As Shoes runs, does it remember objects in a persistent cache, even
when programs come and go?
I am running Shoes r970 on Mac OS X. This is what was happening: I had
discovered that calling the lowercase version of a class in Shoes to
initialize the class only works on Widgets now. So this doesn't work
anymore:
class OKButton < Button
def initialize
super 'OK' do
visit '/'
end
end
end
Shoes.app do
okbutton
end
...So I changed it to this, but _while Shoes was still running_:
class OKButton < Widget
def initialize
button 'OK' do
visit '/'
end
end
end
Shoes.app do
okbutton
end
When I reran the program through Shoes, though, Shoes raised a
superclass mismatch error, which was unexpected. However, _quitting
and reopening Shoes got rid of the problem_.
Now that I think about it, this explains why my programs run much
faster the second and third times I run them in Shoes. Shoes must be
keeping persistent copies of the classes or objects, or maybe
compilations of the programs, when it still runs. This is very good
for speed. However, it makes me worry about more surprising behavior
that may happen, such as programs interfering with each other, if the
program's classes or compilations are persistent.
Can there be documentation about how Shoes does this? It's resulted in
surprising behavior for me already, and I'm afraid more surprises are
in the future for those who keep running Shoes. Also, I can just
restart Shoes every time to prevent problems like this as I modify my
program, but it's kind of annoying. Can there be a switch to make
Shoes sandbox its programs so that it doesn't cache...whatever it
saves, and reloads completely every time?
Or, I could just be completely mistaken, but in any case, more
documentation on what is happening would be lovely.
Sincerely,
Joshua Choi
