top | item 25140574

(no title)

I am aware of multiple hacky solutions, such as loop detection and adding timeouts. This fails in most non-trivial creative coding applications due to long running code. I'm interested what it would take to come up with a general escape hatch like any shell user has.

discuss

protoduction|5 years ago

On Starboard[0] I approached this by sandboxing the notebook code in an iframe on a different origin. This sandboxing has to be done anyway to prevent XSS.

If you type while(true){} in a notebook only the iframe will break (and usually your browser will prompt you after a while to kill it). When you do only the iframe is no longer functional.

I don't think there's an elegant way to solve it any differently in the browser.

[0]: https://starboard.gg

angleofrepose|5 years ago

Hi, yes! I like your project. I chatted about similar things on your launch post here. You also address this explicitly on your product which I appreciate.

What I'm getting at is that these browser notebooks try to get at the desire and feeling for rapid exploration and iteration. Losing context by having a crashing logic error is a massive blow to that ideal.

I'm not saying that your or anyone elses product is only for "rapid prototyping" but it's still true that larger projects could be bit by the same errors. When I crash my native code I C-c and I'm back in an instant. When I crash browser notebook code I lose a bit of time and unsaved code. I crash browsers often in creative coding where I write many loops and don't always do them right.

It may also be that my chrome and firefox experience on linus is worse than standard, I don't know. But I have crashed my entire browser in chrome when using observable, and I thought that wasn't supposed to be possible.

jraph|5 years ago

That's clever. Do you know if there is something possible using web workers? maybe running the "sandboxed code" in the worker? I don't really know how they work and if it is possible to interrupt them from the main thread.

jraph|5 years ago

A timeout would most certainly not trigger during a busy loop in JS. Timeouts can only trigger when the main thread is not running code.

Browsers will complain against code running for too long without interruption though.

angleofrepose|5 years ago

Yes, as the other comments get at the "hack" I'm referring to is a loop transform that adds a timer check to the condition.