On Rio, we simply want to restart the robot program as quickly as possible,
and don't want to risk a hang somewhere that will keep that from happening.
The main downside of this is it won't wait for threads to finish (e.g. data logs won't get a final flush).
The current DS thread model has some pretty major issues. It makes it difficult to know if all data is from the same remote packet, and if the data changes while the robot loop is running. Additionally, the DS thread is used for a few other things (MotorSafety and State Tracking for EducationalRobot). This also makes sim difficult, as user code has to wait for the thread to know it has new data.
This change completely rethinks how threading works in the driver station model.
First, the DS HAL system receives a new data callback, either from Netcomm or DriverStationSim. Inside the context of this callback, all the low latency data is read and put into a cache. Doing some investigation on the robot side, this is perfectly safe to do, and also ensures a ds packet will not be parsed before we finish reading the current packet data.
After all data is read, the cache is swapped with a 2nd buffer. This buffer just stores the data, none of the HAL DS calls read from this buffer. An event is then fired, stating there is new data ready to go.
Robot code calls HAL_UpdateDSData(). This swaps the 2nd buffer with a 3rd buffer, which always contains the current data. This data will not be updated until HAL_UpdateDSData is called again. Which solves the state problem.
The high level driver station classes have. an updateData() call, which calls HAL_UpdateDSData, and then update button state variables, then data log and update the NT FMS data table (Java also caches across the JNI boundary here, but that could trivially be removed). An extra event provider is provided, allowing other threads to know when this call has been completed.
IterativeRobotBase calls DS.updateData() at the beginning of each loop, and only once per loop. This means all commands will always have the same state.
All of this means there is no longer a DS thread. Everything happens synchronously. This means Sim and testing is easier, as you can just call DriverStationSim.NotifyNewData(), and then DriverStation.UpdateData(), and you can guarantee that all the DriverStation.*** data is up to date.
As for Motor Safety and Educational Robot State Handling, those can all be handled by their own threads. The Educational Thread only needs to run under EducationalRobot, and MotorSafety will only be started if there is a motor safety object enabled.
- Twine, StringRef, Format, and NativeFormatting have been removed
- Logging now uses fmtlib style formatting
- Nearly all uses of wpi::outs/errs have been replaced with fmt::print() or
std::puts()/std::fputs() (for unformatted strings).
- A wpi/fmt/raw_ostream.h header has been added to enable
fmt::print() with wpi::raw_ostream
Default behavior is still to run the robot main loop in the main thread.
The ability to run the robot main loop in a separate thread and add a hook
for running a different function in the main thread is needed for simulation
GUI support on some platforms.
The old headers were moved into folders because doing so avoids polluting
the system include directories.
Folder names were also normalized to lowercase.
Also switch eventName and gameSpecificData to fixed 64-byte arrays to avoid mallocs and
extra NetComm calls. This behavior matches 2018 LabView.
The DS caching is kept in Java to avoid JNI and/or massive amounts of allocations.
This does not increase latency because Java still only hits NetComm once.
Moving the DS caching benefits all languages other than Java, because it avoids the need
for individual implementations. If caching is ever added to NetComm, it will then only be
necessary to remove it from the HAL and Java rather than all languages.
During shared library loading, a different libLLVM can be pulled in, causing
llvm symbols from dependent libraries to resolve to that library instead of
this one. This has been seen in the wild with the Mesa OpenGL implementation
in JavaFX applications (see wpilibsuite/shuffleboard#361).
This is clearly a very breaking change. For some level of backwards
compatibility, a namespace alias from llvm to wpi is performed in the "llvm"
headers. Unfortunately, forward declarations of llvm classes will still break,
but compilers seem to generate clear error messages in those cases
("namespace alias 'llvm' not allowed here, assuming 'wpi'").
This change also moves all the wpiutil headers to a single "wpi" subdirectory
from the previously split "llvm", "support", "tcpsockets", and "udpsockets".
Shim headers will be added for backwards compatibility in a later commit.
