hs.application constructors returning duplicate objects

[joshkaplan]

All hs.application constructors seem to be returning duplicate objects. I've tested hs.application.get() and hs.window.focusedWindow():application().

> hs.application.get('Google Chrome')
hs.application: Google Chrome (0x600000f95938)

> hs.application.get('Google Chrome')
hs.application: Google Chrome (0x600000f03ff8)

> hs.application.get('Google Chrome')
hs.application: Google Chrome (0x600000fad6b8)

I have also noticed that hs.application.isFrontmost now always returns returns false. I suspect the two are related?

[joshkaplan]

If others are experiencing issues, a temporary workaround for determining the front most application would be to compare bundleIDs:

hs.window.focusedWindow():application():bundleID() == hs.application.get('Google Chrome'):bundleID()

[ash14]

+1, on Big Sur 11.2.1:

Version 0.9.82 (5614)

> app = hs.application.frontmostApplication()
2021-03-04 11:21:17: -- Loading extension: application


> app
hs.application: Hammerspoon (0x60000160c6b8)

> app:isFrontmost()
true

Version 0.9.83 (5819)

> app = hs.application.frontmostApplication()
2021-03-04 11:22:01: -- Loading extension: application


> app
hs.application: Hammerspoon (0x6000022d6f78)

> app:isFrontmost()
false

[dasmurphy]

I can confirm the bug also on MacOS 10.14.6. All tests from @joshkaplan and @ash14 have the same results.

[cmsj]

I rewrote isFrontmost() for 0.9.83 to try and make it more reliable. It seems like I missed something. Thanks for the reports, I'll investigate and probably push out a 0.9.84 quickly to at least revert it.

[gp42]

my apologies, opened a similar issue: #2721
Will close it, lets track this issue here.

[cmsj]

So just to give a bit of background here, the hs.application objects being different C pointers is expected behaviour - hs.application objects are pretty lightweight Objective C objecst that don't contain any state of their own, so it's easier/simpler to create new ones as needed than it is to try and cache/reuse them. We provide Lua metamethods like __eq so that comparisons between the objects behaves as expected:

> foo1 = hs.application.get('Safari')
> foo2 = hs.application.get('Safari')
> foo1
hs.application: Safari (0x6000026c3e78)
> foo2
hs.application: Safari (0x6000029408b8)
> foo1 == foo2
true

The issue here is that :isFrontmost() was consistently failing in CI and I decided to rewrite it (24e0b05) to use a different underlying strategy which passes CI, but it turns out that our CI tests for hs.application are not working as intended.

I'm reverting that patch in #2723 and I'll release a 0.9.84 brownbag later today.