Bug - Indicator Kills Ninja

[NJA_MC]

Brett,

I agree with NinjaTraders assessment on this part. Adding the overhead to Isolate 3rd parties from the NT platform will slow down tick level processing and overall the entire application.

It is up to the developer to validate their application works properly within this tool. I feel that NinjaTrader should do their best to reporting the cause of a fault when they can, but I can't say that is always possible. For example, my C# routine may force a system reboot. NT8 might not know the reason why it is being terminated during the reboot process. I would hope that NT8 would catch exceptions and help put to what was the cause to facilitate the correction of the problem.

[koganam]

Its fine to disagree but just to clarify I'm not talking semantics or opinions here but technical facts. In which case getting on the same page with terms used is the first step.

Technically there just isn't a viable approach with the current state of C# and .Net framework provided from Microsoft to build an 'isolated host environment' for C# code written by third parties to execute in vs NinjaTrader code. This separation of execution context can be thought of similarly to 'processes' at the OS level.

We've looked into utilizing similar C# concepts such as App Domains and Processes but they simply have to high of cost in cross communication to be effective and as such are not an option for NinjaTrader.

In this technical definition NinjaTrader is not 'hosting' third party code in its own 'isolated execution environment' and the execution context is shared by both NinjaTrader and the Third Party Code. Having an 'isolated execution environment' is what would be required to achieve what 'reach4thelasers' is suggesting and for the reasons above is not technically possible at this time.

I understood that Brett, hence my statements in an earlier post thus:

,,,
My real question is whether it is a reasonable expectation that NT must go to extraordinary measures to protect programmers from themselves. If a programmer's application crashes the trading platform, it is up to the programmer to fix his code, or lose his customers; not for NT to devote resources to programming measures to kill the sloppy code. NT set out to create a platform, not an operating system.

Sure NT is more elaborate than a game like Minesweeper. Still that does not mean that is needs to become a sub/quasi-operating system.

Granted that I have used "host" in a somewhat loose manner, I will now simply concede the point to you.

[koganam]

Its fine to disagree but just to clarify I'm not talking semantics or opinions here but technical facts. In which case getting on the same page with terms used is the first step.

In a response to this post, I made a concession about how I may have used "host" badly in the context of NinjaTrader.

However, after reading the errors that the NT program posts, it would appear that the NT developers, as opposed to the Program Managers, agree with my description. How else is one to interpret this error that appears all over the forum, but to interpret it the way that NT itself posts its error message?

A hosted indicator tried to load additional data. All data must first be loaded by the hosting NinjaScript in its configure state.

(emphasis in red mine).

So no, my description was correct. At least as far as the developers are concerned. I withdraw said concession. "Hosted indicator" is quite clearly being "hosted".

This is not "beating a dead horse". Brett clearly says that we must get the terminology right. This is what NT says, so that it what they think it is. N'est ce pas?

[NinjaTrader_Brett]

Would be happy to change the term 'hosted' in the error messaging if there can be a better term to avoid confusion. Since now we're getting into semantics on what different people believe 'hosted' to mean.

Hosted in this error message context is simply meaning an indicator called from another indicator and that the called indicator is 'configured' the same way the calling indicator is (Same data, same parameters, etc) + some additional optimizations to make sure that the indicator only calculates once per OnBarUpdate even if its called multiple times from the calling indicator. This is all handled by NinjaTrader internally.

Sure, there is some context that the called/hosted indicator will run which is why we termed it 'hosted'. However again when I say the term 'hosted' here that does not imply there is some container where it runs off by itself like you think of Android Apps for example would do. Its very much apart of the hosting indicators execution context which is the technical hurdle we much jump.

Its a great idea to really separate our addons like you see in android apps or even windows apps, really is and hope we can find a way someday that doesn't have any negative implications (such as poor performance). Since sure we could achieve this today but with known methods and the interactivity between addon's performance would be so heavily penalized since crossing the process boundary is expensive that it just wouldn't be worth it.

-Brett