On Kaleidoscope.use() and .setup()

Programming Kaleidoscope Internals
1

Strictly speaking, the Kaleidoscope-Leader plugin has a bug. Its README.md says:

Note that we need to use the Leader object before any other that adds or changes key behaviour! Failing to do so may result in unpredictable behaviour.

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2

And Qukeys and Kaleidoscope-Papageno have bugs as well because they also like to be .use(...)d first. I donā€™t see a way to avoid this.

I think such special requirements should be acceptable behavior, and not a bug, as long as they are well documented.

3

You might be misunderstanding what I meant when I asked that question. I was confused why a lot of examples for plugins listed kaleidoscope.setup() after kaleidoscope.use (list of plugins) where the default firmware lists them the other way around. I didnā€™t take what @Algernon said to mean that it would be a bug if the order of the list of plugins was important, just that if the order of .setup() and .use() in relation to each other were important, that would be a bug.

4

Yeah, you are right. I misread that.

Now, that we are speaking about it, why isnā€™t Kaleidoscope.setup() called automatically by Kaleidoscope.use(...)?

5

Because Kaleidoscope.use() is optional. We could document that one needs to call either of the two, but itā€™s a lot easier if we just use both, always. Makes copy & pasting the factory firmware easier too.

We could also teach Kaleidoscope.loop() to check if .setup() was called, and run it once if it hasnā€™t, but thatā€™d be a bit of an ugly hack for very little gain, in my opinion.

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6

Not sure. It would be extremely cheap (1 byte of RAM, few bytes of PROGMEM, few cycles for the noop function calls every loop) and completely backwards compatible.

void
Kaleidoscope_::setup(void) {
   static bool alreadyCalled = false;
   if(alreadyCalled) { return; }
   alreadyCalled = true;
   ...
}

void
Kaleidoscope_::loop(void) {
   this->setup();
   ...
}
7

Not saying it is expensive in any sense, my thinking is that this is not needed right now. With loop() calling setup, weā€™d save one line in the user sketch, a line noone up to this point found either confusing, complicated or anything like it. In return, we add 3 more elsewhere.

Itā€™s a small thing either way, but not something I feel there is a need for. :slight_smile:

And with .use() likely to go away at some point, and us moving towards a moreā€¦ declarative way of specifying what plugins to use, setup() will end up being a few property settings and Kaleidoscope.setup()ā€¦ in this setup, I feel it makes more sense to have an explicit call to it. On the other hand, this is just a feeling, or my own aesthetic preference if you like.

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8

Every line you spare the user of an interface to write is worth several lines in the interfaceā€™s implementation.

Yep, but only up to this pointā€¦
I suppose there are many people being confused about a lot of things, but only few of them actually write about it.