unclear on how to add parent process names to `scn.process_handling.ALLOWED_PARENTS`

[LFSaw]

I am using VSCode with the SuperCollider plugin by @scztt.
Running sc3nb in parallel is cumbersome since it always kills the sclang process of the extension with

 Terminating psutil.Process(pid=24730, name='sclang', status='running', started='11:03:27') because none of the parents=[psutil.Process(pid=35107, name='Code Helper (Plugin)', status='running', started='2025-04-11 15:00:50'), psutil.Process(pid=94134, name='Electron', status='running', started='2025-04-11 13:34:14'), psutil.Process(pid=1, name='launchd', status='running', started='2025-03-20 17:50:34'), psutil.Process(pid=0, name='kernel_task', status='running', started='2025-03-20 17:50:34')] are in allowed_parents=('scide', 'python', 'tox') More information can be found in the documentation.

Adding 'Code Helper (Plugin)' to scn.process_handling.ALLOWED_PARENTS with

scn.process_handling.ALLOWED_PARENTS = ('scide', 'python', 'tox', 'code', 'vscode', 'Electron')

did not change it. What am I doing wrong?
The documentation is not clear on how to proceed, or at least I could not find the information there.

thanks in advance!
+++

[thomas-hermann]

in vscode (as of 2025-04-15), I only find the vscode-supercollider extension by jatinchowdhury18, but not from scztt. Does your error also occur with that extension? (that would make it easier for me to quickly reproduce/test/debug). Some questions / suggestions:

• Have you tried to include 'Code Helper (Plugin)' as entry into ALLOWED_PARENTS?
• Have you tried to pass your list as argument to SCServer.boot(), e.g. by
  • sc.get_default().start_server(scn.ServerOptions(57161), allowed_parents=('scide', 'Code Helper (Plugin)'))
• maybe setting kill_others=True in start_server can prevent the unwanted side effect?

[LFSaw]

The vscode-supercollider plugin by @scztt is in (slow) active development but already quite awesome. See

• https://scsynth.org/t/supercollider-vscode-language-server-protocol-support/5574
• https://github.com/[scztt/vscode-supercollider](https://github.com/scztt/vscode-supercollider)
• https://github.com/[scztt/LanguageServer.quark](https://github.com/scztt/LanguageServer.quark)

The last link might be especially interesting because this is an extension for SC that facilitates communications with external editors (non-scide) such as e.g. as sc3nb ...

AFAIK, the vscode plugin is very different from the one by jatinchowdhury18, so I think there's no point in testing with that...

• Have you tried to include 'Code Helper (Plugin)' as entry into ALLOWED_PARENTS?

yepp, no luck

• Have you tried to pass your list as argument to SCServer.boot(), e.g. by 'sc.get_default().start_server(scn.ServerOptions(57161), allowed_parents=('scide', 'Code Helper (Plugin)'))'

not yet, will do ASAP and report back
UPDATE: this works. So it seems that ALLOWED_PARENTS is not properly read during instantiation...

• maybe setting 'kill_others=True' in 'start_server' can prevent the unwanted side effect?

This is what I figured that works, however I'm loosing the nice feature of killing the sc3nb-related processes when "accidentally" restarting the python kernel ;)

[scztt]

I can look on my side, but at a glance it seems like its just a matter of setting the allowed_parents correctly.

I have also been interested in connecting the SuperCollider language server / vscode plugin to Jupyter notebooks. I would extend an offer to @thomas-hermann / whoever else is working on this project: my VSCode plugin can handle sclang process management, executing code, and implements all standard features for languages in VSCode (highlighting, auto-complete, symbol lookup, etc). AFAIK it's also possible to communicate between vscode extensions in the same vscode workspace. It might make sense to have our two extensions work together, so that the sc3nb handles the notebook + sonification functionality, and my vscode plugin handles all of the language-related stuff: executing code, process management etc. This would mean less chance of conflicts like this, and you would get the expanded language features from the VSCode extension -and have to maintain less code related to sclang inter-communication stuff.

If you provided me with a sketch of the API you want between sc3nb and SuperCollider, I'd be happy to make a sketch of what this would look like to use the VSCode extension for communication versus connecting directly to sclang yourself. In particular, the plugin is already set up to send structured JSON data back and forth to sclang, and has an extensible architecture so that you could comunicate directly with SuperCollider classes in sclang from your VScode extension, which might simplify things a lot.

Happy to explore further, feel free to email me to add a new feature request to the vscode extension repo ([https://github.com/scztt/vscode-supercollider](https://github.com/%5Bscztt/vscode-supercollider%5D(https://github.com/scztt/vscode-supercollider))) with details about what kind of API you would need, and I can try to sketch it out.

[LFSaw]

Thanks, scott, for your offer! I am happy to be a testing buddy since I'd use both systems (also for teaching, so lots of user errors to circumvent).

(PS: I updated my last comment to include more info on the ALLOWED_PARENTS issue)