Hey folks, I have an idea for when you get around to working on the newer engine and thus a newer stack format and that is, what if we could load a stack into the memory using a sequence of bytes. Now the grounds for this idea are that I believe the way a stack works is that it is effectively a data structure that is serialized to disk, I've worked with serialization in Java for University and I think this would be a great addition.
If for example, I am going to store all the files I have for a stack into a ZIP archive and have just the ZIP and the built executable on the users hard drive, it would be great if I could just read in a stack from the ZIP (Without extracting to a temporary location) and store the binary data in a variable and then pass this to the engine to be constructed into the in memory version of the stack, effectively, something akin to this:
Code: Select all
// The code that would go here would read the file from the ZIP archive and store it in a variable called tStackData
Put The Short Name Of Stack tStackData Into tStackName
The engine would then take the data and reconstruct the stack in the memory as if it had just read it in as a normal file. I think people would benefit from this, because in the example above, a ZIP file could keep the disk space occupied down if someone built a really big LiveCode app, personally I would use this sort of thing as virtual file system for Xenon, it would give me the opportunity to do things like file and folder ACLs.