Broken Link

[sneakyfelix]

Most appropriate sections of the p5.js website?

Contribute

What is your operating system?

Mac OS

Web browser and version

https://p5js.org/contribute/fes_contribution_guide/#-development-notes

Actual Behavior

On the Friendly Errors System Contribution Guide contributor page, there is a broken link for "See the Friendly Error performance test." pointing to a dead file path on GitHub that throws a 404 error page.

Expected Behavior

The main branch of p5.js-website does not contain the path src/assets/learn/performance/code/friendly-error-system.

Steps to reproduce

1. Go to https://p5js.org/contribute/fes_contribution_guide/
2. Scroll down to the Performance Issue with the FES subsection inside the Development Notes section.
3. Locate the link text "Friendly Error performance test" which links to https://github.com/processing/p5.js-website/tree/main/src/assets/learn/performance/code/friendly-error-system.

Would you like to work on the issue?

Yes and any broken links

[NisargJasani0602]

Thanks for flagging this - dug into it a bit.

Root cause: The path src/assets/learn/performance/code/friendly-error-system has never existed anywhere in this repo's history (checked back to 2015).

The content itself is actually mirrored from processing/p5.js's contributor_docs/ folder via a sync script, and the same dead link exists upstream there too, in:

contributor_docs/fes_contribution_guide.md
contributor_docs/friendly_error_system.md

locale copies (zh-Hans, ko, ja)
That means fixing it only here will get overwritten the next time docs are re-synced from p5.js — the real fix needs to happen upstream in processing/p5.js, and this repo will pick it up automatically.

Two possible scopes, worth separating:

1. Quick fix: just remove the dead hyperlink, keep the sentence as plain text — no such benchmark file has ever existed, so there's nothing to restore.

2. Bigger follow-up (separate issue): actually build the FES benchmark the link implies, using p5.js's existing test/bench/ harness (Vitest). More involved — needs understanding FES's call-wrapping (src/core/friendly_errors/) and picking a fair workload. Intermediate difficulty.

Happy to open the quick-fix PR upstream in p5.js if that's useful — let me know if you'd rather take it since you filed the issue.

[Ekagrashharma]

I’d be happy to work on this issue if @sneakyfelix isn’t already working on it.

[Nwakaego-Ego]

Thank you, @sneakyfelix, for reporting this, and thank you, @NisargJasani0602, for tracing the contributor documentation back to the processing/p5.js repository. You are correct that the lasting fix should be made in the upstream contributor documentation rather than only in the generated website file.

@NisargJasani0602, there is one detail worth correcting: the Friendly Error performance test did exist. It is still preserved in the archived p5.js-website-legacy repository, and its test code can be found in sketch.js

In 2020, [p5.js issue #4441](processing/p5.js#4441) reported that the benchmark’s former "dist/..." link was broken, and [PR #4442](processing/p5.js#4442) changed it to the current "src/..." path. The benchmark is now in the archived website repository, while the documentation link points to the current p5.js-website repository.

Changing the URL to p5.js-website-legacy would fix the 404, but the archived [index.html](https://github.com/processing/p5.js-website-legacy/blob/main/src/assets/learn/performance/code/friendly-error-system/index.html) loads p5.js 0.5.2. Because the test uses an old version of p5.js, we cannot be sure that its performance results still apply to the current version.

I will leave the direction of the fix open for input from maintainers or contributors who are more familiar with the current Friendly Error System.