warmy-0.6.0

Today I released a new version of warmy, the warmy-0.6.0 release. That release kicks in with a few additions, among:

• Complete rewrite of its internals, enabling optimizations (mostly about allocations).
• A nasty IO-bound bug was removed.

That bug caused long-lasting reloads on stream-copied resources go into weird behavior.

The bug

In order to get the bug, I must give a bit of context.

Imagine you have a large resource, like a 4K texture or a big mesh. Whenever your favourite software writes it to disk, it’s very likely it’ll stream chunks by chunks of bytes. For instance, it might choose to copy the resource 2 MB by 2 MB on disk. On each copy, your file system will generate WRITE events, that warmy will intercept. Before warmy-0.6.0, the default behavior was to reload the resource on the first WRITE event, which was already wrong, because only a very small part of the resource would have changed – I actually witnessed weird behaviors with textures in a demo of mine I’m working on, not seeing the new textures in my demo.

But there’s worse. There’s a parameter you can set of your Store, called update_await_time_ms. That parameter gives warmy a hint about how much time must have passed since the last update in order to effectively call the Load::reload function. However, this is a bit twisted, because if the resource takes more time to reload than update_await_time_ms, it’ll get repeatedly loaded – for as many as WRITE events were generated. This is a bit sick, yeah.

The fix

The fix was pretty simple: change the semantics of that update_await_time_ms. In 0.5.2, it has the default value of 1s, meaning that a resource wouldn’t reload if it was reloaded less than a second ago. The new semantics works on the future. Whenever a WRITE event is intercepted, warmy will call the Load::reload function only if no WRITE event is intercepted in the next update_await_time_ms. It’s a bit like the implementation of a click and a double click: you must wait a bit after you got a MouseRelease event in order to interpret is as a Click because another MouseRelease could arrive soon (generating a DoubleClick if it’s soon enough).

You’ll also notice that update_await_time_ms name sticks better to the new semantics!

In 0.5.2, the default value for update_await_time_ms was 1s. If we kept that value, it would result in a pretty bad overall latency. The value was lowered to 50ms instead.

You can still tweak that value if it doesn’t suit your needs.

More information can be found in the changelog.

On the future of the crate

I’ve been very happy with what warmy has brought to me so far. Other people also gave it a try and for now seem to enjoy it. I’ve gathered a few ideas for the future, based on IRL talks over a beer several beers, and GitHub issues / pull requests:

• We want to be able to pass around a context when loading and reloading. This would enable tweaking the loading behavior of the objects and pass values from the calling function. However, even though the feature is well-identified, it is not well-defined in warmy and more research must be done.
• Multithreading. There’re a few ideas I’d like to implement, like an IO thread that would do all the file IO-bound computation and dispatch the bytes to the other threads; and using Future.

Feel free to test it, and as always, keep the vibes!