I recently installed processing 3.5.3 on a raspberry pi 4 with 4gb RAM. It is running the newest version of Raspbian.
I am having issues where the text editor runs so slowly that it will temporarily freeze every time I finish typing or try to move the text cursor.
I tried updating the amount of ram the program uses, and changing how much of the ram is used for GPU. Neither of these things seem to have fixed the issue.
I am relatively new to this, so if you have some questions to help figure out the issue, feel free to ask and I can hopefully get back to you.
The processing ide has a built in error checker which checks what you type. Sometimes on large files this causes it to freeze, try disabling it, or perhaps I could suggest visual studio code, which has the ability to compile the processing code.
I do know that turning this feature off does cause the issue, but I do find it to be incredibly useful, especially being still somewhat new to coding.
The weird thing about it is that it still causes the freezes on files that only have 6 lines of code and one import.
Would visual studio code offer that type of debugging on a raspberry pi?
I use intelliJ IDEA on my main laptop and really enjoy the debugging as I code, but I’m not entirely sure if I would be able to export from intelliJ to processing.
this is the environment that visual studio code provides. You’ll benefit from code completion for functions variables and variable types, which is nice, and a better tab system as well as being able to download addons, and autosave on compile. The default compile method is slightly slower but considering the advantages its a reasonable tradeoff.
this is normally how I have my preferences in processing, but again, I cannot use the ide for large projects with multiple tabs as tab navigation is clunky. Undo and redo history is global and not per tab, and we cannot collapse brackets.
its weird that you are getting problems even on small files, I might try a clean install of processing instead but without knowing much about the setup its difficult to produce a proper diagnosis.
@paulgoux visual studio on RaspberryPI, I don’t think so. I have a RaspberryPI4 and have installed the development version of processing4 (on Manjaro 64 bit distro). The processing ide is a resource hog, but probably not as bad for me as @Tromba see memory usage below:-
It should be possible to use vim or even geany as your processing environment. I use both when developing my PiCrate sketches see my recent post.
PS: There is no official support for processing on the RaspberryPI at present.
Note:
If you develop code outside processing ide you will need to place your sketch.pde in a folder with same name ie in this case sketch, crap I know but this how processing pre-processor/compiler works. The alternative is to switch from processing to pure java (no pre-processor required), but then you might prefer to look at another processing implementation? Just to get you started with geany, simplest is to just use java syntax highlighting then you need to setup processing-java in the build menu see below:-
I ended up getting visual studio code installed on my raspberry pi and it works great. There was a bit of a learning curve for figuring out pathing and getting libraries installed correctly on my laptop, but I am able to code with the processing language on both my pi and my laptop now.
Here are some helpful links if anyone else wants to try this instead.
@Tromba That’s surprising (that it’s available), but for you it fits the bill, better to stick with what you are familiar. It is likely that processing will drop 32bit support in future. Personally I think processing.org have spent way too much time developing the editor which was developed from jEdit, and by having a pre-processor step they need to re-invent code completion / linting etc. For my ruby-processing projects I can use any editor that supports ruby and do static code analysis etc using common tools.
