VL - Biggest annoyance so far: "Cyclic dependency detected"

I already brought “cyclic dependency detected” up in regards to recursion but that’s not what’s this post is about.

It gets pretty annoying to not be able to use an operation in the same patch it is defined. Whenever I’m working on an operation and decide that parts of it should be made into a node for reuse or simplifying the graph I have to put that in a new patch since it’s impossible to use it otherwise. This quickly explodes into having to create lots of patches instead of keeping related operations in one patch.

It would also be nice to be able to have either or both of nested operations (sub-operations only usable by parent operation) or private operations (only available in patch) for keeping patches more sane without exposing lots of nodes that shouldn’t be accessible from other patches.

Being able to use operations in the same patch as it is defined would be my highest priority wish list item for now.

thanks for your input @beyon, we are of course aware of it and it also gives us patch structures we are not perfectly happy with. we are deciding on our next steps at the moment. there are several means of expression missing which are equally important. so we cannot promise that this will be the first thing we work on since it is possible to overcome this problem with a utility patch or a second data type…

more on that in an upcoming blog post.

…minutes later, somewhere buried in our latest blogposts on vl is the info that utility operations defined on the same patch can now reference each other (as long as no recursion occurs!).