Ok, CCpro now costs $360. I believe I paid $320 and I like where its going. But there are crashing issues. It does not matter the cost here but what does matter is the Ten Commandments of the programmer bible is being broken and one of those commandments is “Thou shalt not crash!”. No matter what! To do that there are coding practices that need to be followed and IOException classes (whatever the case here) that need to be created. But, that is not the case here and I can tell.
Yes, I could send a file and that might fix ONE particular problem but that is NOT the real problem and that is very hard to convey over the phone to someone who might not know what your talking about only for your message to be misconstrued in the red tape of problem fixing and may or may not ever reach the IT department.
I started this thread solely NOT for a question and answering class but to simply allow us users of Carbide create know how much Carbide create is crashing. And, from my experience, again, I would like to say what the real problem is. But, let me explain first…
My first time with CC crashing, which I wrote about and everyone should be let known in this community but I was shut down instead, was CCpro trying to read the text file in the Tools folder during startup. It threw an exception and could not read the first line of text in the file. Since that error had no where to go and was not handled correctly CCpro threw up its hands and crashed and went to bed only to disappear off screen. That is breaking “Thou shalt not crash”!
I know about these things and knew why so sooner or later I fixed it. But to a person, who just paid $360 who does not know about code and doesn’t know how to fix it has to call support for a lengthy conversation and tie up resources all because IOExceptions in reading a text file are not handled correctly.
Honestly I have no idea what language they are using but I can almost garauntee you that there is something similar to a Try/ Catch statement.
When my CC crashed, I knew there was nothing to catch string exceptions. If that were the case than there is nothing to catch ANY exception! Which, leads to crashing! It turns out I was right. My CC continues crashing during certain procedures. It happened 3x yesterday just trying to figure out the Add shape Component parameters a little better. That doesn’t bother me. No problem and it does not matter what I was doing to correct it. If you think it matters then you are guilty of hard coding and the main problem will never get fixed.
What does bother me is commandments are being broken and people are paying money for programs that crash because exceptions are not handled. Please read further before you jump to conclusions.
There are two ways to go about fixing exceptions. You can go through thousands and thousands of lines of code fixing one at a time which takes forever OR you can simply write one class to handle ALL exceptions which surprisingly is not all that many.
This practice of hard coding when it deals with exceptions needs to be stopped and they need to know how many times it is crashing to fully understand the result of their coding practices.
I have version 7… This should have been stopped a long time ago during previous versions but apparently not.
Has your CCpro ever crashed? I do not mean stopped responding. That is a different kind of matter or machine error. I mean as in “Disappear off the screen crashing”. If so, please write about it here please so we can let them know together there is a problem and they might need to look at coding practices a little different. Because if they don’t, sooner or later their share of the market will gradually decline. But that is another matter just to figure that out and a whole 'other topic.
I rarely manage to cause CC Pro to crash. Certainly not using any regular or often used functions. I have found it to be quite reliable while designing - but still always save regularly cause you never know when a 3D driver is going to throw you under a bus.
If you think you’ve found a potential bug, write up exactly what you were doing when it happened. If it can be replicated by others, then it may actually be an issue which can be tracked down & solved.
Thank you for your input.
You did say “rarely”. Rarely does not mean “never”. Can you expand on that please?
I’ve had several crashes (to desktop), but only when pushing the software to it’s limits. Like trying to load a .svg with half a million vectors, or doing a large 3D finish path with very small stepovers.
Like Joel, I find it pretty stable most of the time. For the low cost I’ve been pretty impressed, and happy with it.
I also have ~$40,000 worth of NX software installed (I work for Siemens) and I’ve crashed that too. 
Do you mean it disappears off the screen or does it stop responding?
Very few crashes if any here, not enough to remember. Pretty stable over many hundred hours of work, sometimes on very large files with 50,000 plus lines of code. I’m on an iMac.
Have had several crashes in only my first month - just figured its par for the course. Some were the “we’re going to send us this yo our servers” and some have been the hard kind.
I would say it crashes <1% of the times I use it - as often as my MS Office suite (Excel, Word), and lately, Photoshop (Editorial alert: It used to be that PS was one of the most amazingly clean pieces of code written, but (not surprisingly) since they went to the rapid cloud distribution (Creative Cloud: Ironically, also CC), the quality has sadly fallen with that code /Editorial Alert). On whole, Carbide CC is has been pretty stable — and I use the betas a lot too.
I am also an ex-shrink-wrap coder and am old enough to remember the days of really disciplined software development and testing. I have not found CC or CM to be abnormally sloppy. In fact, for what they’re doing under the covers, it strike a good balance between quality and availability of changes.
My complaints regarding CC throughout the years, has been consistency of interfaces and UX (user experience): Dialogs that don’t work the same way, areas of code that seem to have been developed elsewhere and incorporated, etc. Rob has done a good job of addressing those concerns with each release since v6s - and, while there’s still work to be done (particularly with modeling), it’s definitely been getting better.
I will also say that CC is not the easiest place to learn about CNCs. Before my Shapeoko, I never used a CNC and had no experience with modeling. As my understanding has grown, I’ve been able to make better and better use of the software - but it’s not as intuitive as it could be. I think that growing up as freeware didn’t help in that matter. With the Pro version, you can’t get away with that lack of intuitive interface - and you’ll find several notes from me on that subject. Again - Carbide has been responsive.
All told, I use the software almost daily - very very seldom crash…almost never see it just ‘go away’ - never had a blue-screen of death. I’ve hung a few times (locked up) - but can’t remember the last real “crash”.
- Gary
Thanks a lot for your input. I’ve had lots of uses out of it too and never seems to have a problem but when it does crash (goes off screen) I take a mental note of it and figure out what could have done that. It has crashed several times. 3 or 4 out of those times it was me that put a text file in the tools folder and I accidentally made it where CC could not read the text during startup. However, that is what IOExceptions are for. It catches when it cannot read the input stream and is supposed to keep CC from crashing. I had to manually figure out what I did wrong in saving the spreadsheet of tools. It has something to do with the header when converting the file?
Last night, was using the 3d tools. All I know of that is that it was an exception and that should have been caught using the same class to catch all exceptions.
What I did was (I think) created some shapes, applied the 3d to it and without thinking I immediately went to the tool paths (none in reality were created yet) and pushed the button to show the paths and it immediately crashed with no warning or anything. I did that a couple of more times (not the same everytime) but added the tool next time first and it still crashed and when I say crash it disappeared.
I don’t know why that happened because I didn’t code it but like I said it is an exception just like it is an exception when it can’t read a text file. When it can’t read a text file what is the alternative for a program to do? Instead of providing a dialogue or warning box, or whatever you call it now, to prevent crashing it just crashes.
I’ve never written code for a Mac so I don’t know but if that makes a difference to help resolve crashes then let that be known. Maybe the problem is in the code written for a Mac?