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(Poll) What features do you wish you had in AutoIt?


Feature Poll  

28 members have voted

  1. 1. What features do you wish you had in AutoIt? (multiple choice - choose all features that you would like to see)

    • Cross-platform support
    • Multi-threading
    • Compiliation to machine or byte code
    • Modular programs (compiled files will only contain required modules like Networking etc. instead of everything)
    • Other (Please mention which by posting)


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1 hour ago, Loc said:

multithreading

Will never happen.

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It is quite funny how often this multithreading stuff comes up which probably means one has really no clue what it entails to create a script that will automate something with multithreading. AutoIt3Wrapper is a multi process script and works fine that way. Just shell another process and don't hold your breath for it to be part of the standard AutoIT3 functionality.  

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57 minutes ago, Jos said:

Just shell another process and don't hold your breath for it to be part of the standard AutoIT3 functionality.  

Fair enough, reliable multi-threading could only be part of a ground-up rewrite effort.  And shelling gets the job done.

But what about true forking, which meets in the middle?

By that I mean after fork() is called the process is duplicated with all the state being preserved, e.g. handles, stack, heap etc.

The only way to distinguish the forking from the forked is the return from the function.

This, although still multi-process, is valuable, as you don’t need to set the state at the variable level, instead you set state once and then fork as many helper processes as needed.

Windows is Posix compliant, so I would think fork available somehow, but searching briefly I don’t see any successful implementations in AutoIt.  Though I may have missed it for sure.

Code hard, but don’t hard code...

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@Jos While you are right, I'd argue it's more about convenience and efficiency. There are also legit uses for MT, otherwise we'd all be using single core processors instead of the latest 32-core Intel Radon or whatever it is :lol:

Multi-threading is not an essential feature in high-level programming, but it sure is a powerful feature.

@JockoDundee Interesting take, but I don't think Windows has a true fork due to all of the security and handles stuff...

P.S I didn't realize there was another page full of replies when I made my previous post.

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On 10/9/2021 at 12:25 PM, CoffeeJoe said:

Then I remember that its a scripting language not an application development platform.

I feel like this is a super important point. Whenever my application gets complicated enough that multithreading would be helpful, I realize that it's time to rewrite (at least) that portion in another language. AutoIt is for automating things, not building applications. That's not to say I haven't tried though :D

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RAM, Disk and CPU have plenty power/big/unrestricted nowadays.
I write programs/applications/CallItWhatYouWill without much of a problem in AutoIt. Open your browser and you're gonna see forking left and right.
I believe that those who wish for MT in AutoIt scripting, could not code it ( in C, Rust, ASM, etc. ) and if did, it would work more like forking than anything else hence, fork if you need to and drop the MT rhetorical. It gets boring.

...and if the code is too heavy for AutoIt scripting:

2 hours ago, seadoggie01 said:

it's time to rewrite (at least) that portion in another language.

 

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8 hours ago, argumentum said:

 you need to and drop the MT rhetorical. It gets boring.

 

 

I feel like this conversation has been going since I joined this board.
I'm starting to wonder if that conversation is as old as Autoit 2.

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14 hours ago, seadoggie01 said:

AutoIt is for automating things, not building applications.

Sorry, gotta disagree with you there, as I have built plenty of applications. So it does both.

Sure, it doesn't have multi-threading and is not as fast as some other languages, but it can create great applications, and very quickly compared to most other languages.

But as they say, use the right tool for the job, and there is certainly some jobs or applications that AutoIt is ill-suited for ... or another language does it better in some significant way.

When AutoIt was introduced to the world, it was just a great scripting language, since then it has become a great GUI language as well. And back then, multi-threading wasn't even really a thing, multi-core processors either, certainly not for most ... unless maybe you owned an Apple PC.

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1 hour ago, TheSaint said:

Sorry, gotta disagree with you there

You're right. I worded that badly, good catch. Something more like "AutoIt was intended for automating things" would be more accurate. Trying to say, use the right tool and all well, read TheSaint's post above, lol

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Acro.au3 UDF - Automating Acrobat Pro
ToDo Finder - Find #ToDo: lines in your scripts
UI-SimpleWrappers UDF - Use UI Automation more Simply-er
KeePass UDF - Automate KeePass, a password manager
InputBoxes - Simple Input boxes for various variable types

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@Earthshine Can you share the reason? Also, do you mean "im out" as in "im out" of this thread or as in "im out" of this forum? :blink:

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im out of the thread.

I used to use it in our installer distros.

we can't use it because all our clients were complaining about virus stuff all the time, so it's use got voted out. We can still use it to test our GUIs and such and internal use.

So, me I can't barely use it at all. Plus I really don't need to. I do all my builds in Git-Bash using bash scripts... lol

i had big dreams to do all kinds of product testing with it but never got to do that work. So then I automated all the builds instead and made my life much easier to manage. Just need to do normal dev and stay all up to date. What with updates to redists and all kinds of stuff we ship, I want to keep them up to date and ready to roll in case we need to do a patch

Edited by Earthshine

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Well, that's good to know.

Only if AutoIt executables weren't detected as viruses all the time. I updated one of my programs 2 weeks ago but due to all the false positives, the update process at chocolatey (it's a software repository) is still not complete.

4 hours ago, Earthshine said:

i had big dreams to do all kinds of product testing with it but never got to do that work.

Yeah, in my opinion AutoIt isn't the best tool for product testing, instead one should rely on more integrated methods to test, and nothing tops a manual test by a human before a major release ;)

AutoIt is good for quick and easy automation, which is exactly what it's made for.

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4 hours ago, Earthshine said:

we can't use it because all our clients were complaining about virus stuff all the time, so it's use got voted out.

One AutoIt “feature” that won’t be transferred to EasyCodeIt is a predisposition to anti-viral false positives.

Although, that’s actually not my call :)

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