Roku Developer Program

[greubel]

Is it possible to pass a parameter by reference instead of by value ? According to the documentation, arrays types are passed by reference but is there a way to pass the address of a value into a subroutine ?

[belltown]

You can make the value an array element and pass the array to your function. To access the value you would use value [0]:

value = [12345]

callByValue (value)

print value [0]

sub callByValue (value as object)
    value [0] = 54321
end sub

[TheEndless]

I'd probably go with an associative array wrapper (e.g., refParam = { Value: valueToPassByRef }), similar to what belltown suggested, but as an alternative for intrinsic types, if you box them first (or explicitly CreateObject them) and specify the function parameter "as Object", you can use the setter to reset the value.

Sub Main()
    myInt = 1
    myInt = Box(myInt)
    print "Before:"; myInt
    ResetInteger(myInt)
    print "After:"; myInt
End Sub

Sub ResetInteger(input As Object)
    input.SetInt(10)
End Sub

[RokuJoel]

On a related note, the performance issues that were seen with regards to Associative Array access should be fixed or at least significantly improved in the latest 4.8 release.

- Joel

[greubel]

Thanks ! This appears to work.

Sub test()
a = 1
a = box(a)
b = "Now is the time"
b = box(b)
? "a = " Type(a) " val = " a
? "b = " Type(b) " val = " b
chk( [9,a,b,0] )
? "a = " Type(a) " val = " a
? "b = " Type(b) " val = " b
end
End Sub

Sub chk( in as dynamic )
? "in = " type(in)
? in
in[1].SetInt(2)
in[2].SetString("The quick brown fox")
End sub
-----------------------------------------
a = roInt val = 1
b = roString val = Now is the time
in = roArray
9
1
Now is the time
0

a = roInt val = 2
b = roString val = The quick brown fox

[MazeWizzard]

"RokuJoel" wrote:
On a related note, the performance issues that were seen with regards to Associative Array access should be fixed or at least significantly improved in the latest 4.8 release.

- Joel

Not to hijack the thread or anything...glad you got the byvalue/byreference thing working OP. But this statement is monumental. I guess I'll have to pick up my Roku development again, since performance of AA's (and objects in AA's) was a bottleneck that caused me to stop. At least I should do some benchmarking/profiling again.

Wish it had been in the release notes. I had all but given up and put it aside. Didn't bother. Now I missed a month. My bad. Should check occasionally anyway I guess.

Thanks for the info. 🙂

[kbenson]

Efficient dissemination of changes/fixes/features in new firmware releases has always been a problem. At least they have a wiki now, so maybe they can make some use of it to help this.

[RokuJoel]

Yeah, in the release publication we just said "performance improvements". I checked with engineering and was told that the fixes they were working on for AA's are indeed in the most recent release, (@ktbenson you might want to check with your performance testing suite to measure how much if any, significant improvement there is).

- Joel