processing-java violates "Rule of Silence" by printing debug information to stdout

[tyukiand]

Processing is great if one wants to take some input data and transform it into an image or an animation. Moreover, I think it can be also very useful for the other direction, namely: take an image as input, analyse it, print the result as text. However, processing-java always produces some debug output, which has to be removed either by stream redirection or some other tools like awk or sed.

Example

void setup() {
  /* load some images, grab pixels, do some calculations */
  println("Very useful result = " + 42);
  exit();
}

If I call it as follows:

processing-java --sketch="nameOfTheSketch" --run

the expected output would be:

Very useful result = 42

but the actual output is:

Listening for transport dt_socket at address: 8651
Very useful result = 42
Finished.

Problem

There are two unexpected lines printed to stdout: the first line is the cryptic message "Listening for transport dt_socket at address:" followed by a random 4-digit number. The last message is always trivially true.

Proposed solutions

Short solution
Eliminate both messages altogether. In processing/java/src/processing/mode/java/Commander.java delete the line

  systemOut.println("Finished.");

and in processing/java/src/processing/mode/java/runner/Runner.java
replace the line

String jdwpArg = "-agentlib:jdwp=transport=dt_socket,address=" + portStr + ",server=y,suspend=y";

by

String jdwpArg = "-agentlib:jdwp=transport=dt_socket,address=" + portStr + ",server=y,suspend=y,quiet=y";

This solution might break some existing code (maybe someone already uses this in a script, and drops the first line of the output).

Long(er) solution
Add a --quiet flag to processing-java. This is not complicated either, I've implemented it here:

https://github.com/tyukiand/processing/commit/3cfa89c4e360711dd4ac665f224771648744f309

(link to commit)

Now, one can call processing-java as follows:

processing-java --sketch="nameOfTheSketch" --quiet --run

and it would produce only:

Very useful result = 42

This does not break any existing scripts that use processing-java, but it would make the STDOUT more useful than it is right now.

[benfry]

Fixed for 3.0.2, see discussion in #4103.

[github-actions]

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