Unable to run CIF simulation in stand-alone mode using ./bin/cifsim

When running the CIF simulator in stand-alone mode using ./bin/cifsim it crashes showing the following message:

ERROR: Failed to open editor "org.eclipse.escet.cif.simulator.input.InteractiveGuiInputEditor" for file "philosophers1.cif".
CAUSE: (IllegalStateException) Workbench has not been created yet.

Looking into the code, this error is caused by EclipseThemeUtils.isDarkThemeInUse() as it calls PlatformUI.getWorkbench(). Because the workbench is not active in stand-alone mode, this call fails.

Modifying the code to work around this issue revealed a second issue where the application crashes when it calls InstanceScope.INSTANCE.getNode(ThemeEngine.THEME_PLUGIN_ID) in the EclipseThemePreferenceChangeListener class. The InstanceScope.INSTANCE.getNode() functionality requires the workspace location to be specified. Again, when running in stand-alone mode this location is not specified.

Browsing the git history, it seems the introduction of "Dark theme" support broke the escet stand-alone tools ./bin/cifsim and ./bin/cifsynthanalys as it added dependencies to the Eclipse Workbench environment and workspace location which are not present in stand-alone mode.

See #417 More ESCET dark theme support

As suggested in, the canceled, merge request !555 (closed) I propose seperatly resolving the follwoing related issues:

(!557 (merged)) Resolve startup error for all eventbased stand-alone application. !555 comment
(!558 (merged)) Adding run configuration to run/debug stand-alone CIF simulator from Eclipse.
(!561 (merged)) Resolve error running stand-alone applications without a workspace. !555 comment
(!561 (merged)) Resolve error checking for Dark mode by stand-alone applications. !555 comment
(!559 (merged)) Resolve standalone cifsynthanaly closing immediately. !555 comment

Edited Apr 25, 2023 by Patrick van Berkel