p5.js Editor + Friendly Errors

[catarak]

How would this new feature help increase access to p5.js?

This would improve the friendly errors on the web editor!

Most appropriate sub-area of p5.js?

• Accessibility (Web Accessibility)
• Build tools and processes
• Color
• Core/Environment/Rendering
• Data
• DOM
• Events
• Friendly error system
• Image
• IO (Input/Output)
• Localization
• Math
• Unit Testing
• Typography
• Utilities
• WebGL
• Other (specify if possible)

Feature enhancement details:

TL;DR: I would like to get access to the private function report() to monkey patch it in order to make friendly errors look better in the web editor.

Why I would like to do this: I've been updating the way the p5.js Editor renders sketches for security reasons (processing/p5.js-web-editor#166). Recently, this issue came in (processing/p5.js-web-editor#1853) about the web editor not being friendly with using the debugger. I did some thinking about how to fix this and came up with a solution! But. It caused me to look at how friendly errors look in the web editor.

Current rendering engine, friendly errors

New rendering engine, friendly errors

As you can see, the friendly errors don't give useful information about the error location due to the magic that the p5.js editor does in order to render everything client-side. What are these seemingly meaningless URLs? They are Object URLs.

But! If I were able to monkey patch the report() function, I would be able to substitute the actual file names for the ObjectURLs in the messages.

Also, my reasoning for requesting for monkey patching versus a public API for updating the friendly errors is that this issue is editor specific—I'm not sure this issue would come up in any other places.

[nully0x]

while working with the web-editor I noticed the inconsistencies in error reporting and references this you have pointed out.

[outofambit]

@catarak i'm very willing to make report monkeypatchable for the editor! i can take this one

[catarak]

thank you @outofambit!

I also wonder if it would ever make sense to create an API for the p5.js FES. Some reasons that come to my head:

• Allowing p5.js addons to create friendly errors
• Allowing p5.js addons to overwrite friendly errors, targeting different user demographics, perhaps for internationalization or other reasons