Re: octave gui & mingw

[John Swensen]

Not to burst your bubble, but while embedding octave is fairly easy,
re-implementing all the command history, tab completions,etc,etc already
provided by readline and the existing Octave interface is harder than
you think.  I went down this exact same path a couple of years ago and
in the end, I decided that running a full-up octave instance in a
terminal emulator is a much better option.

You are free to do whatever you want (the beauty of open source
software), but from someone who tried and failed going down that path, I
just thought I would warn you.

John Swensen

Sebastien Loisel wrote:
>
>     These seem to be two separate projects (GUI and plotting), both of
>     which are large jobs. 
>
>
> Maybe that's the case, but I would like to think not -- call me an
> optimist. However, instead of guessing, I'll give it a shot probably
> this weekend or in the next few weeks and then we'll see. Assuming
> that I can get David's MinGW build scripts to go and if all goes well,
> I should have something to look at by then. I mean, half the "GUI" is
> already done, just go and run that QT color syntax highlighter and
> you'll see. (It's not nice, but it's a great start!) The plotting
> doesn't scare me, I have a lot of experience with graphics. (I've
> worked at SGI, Sun and NVidia.)
>
>     subject was "handle grapics with Document/View design".  The following
>     posting includes a link to some code I wrote that will give you an
>     idea of what I have in mind:
>
>       http://www.octave.org/mailing-lists/octave-maintainers/2005/853
>     <http://www.octave.org/mailing-lists/octave-maintainers/2005/853>
>
>
> This is very similar to what I want to do! However, I probably need a
> little more performance. I also thought to use gnuplot in that way,
> and perhaps now I can just use that code to test it. However, my idea
> was to have a function to draw a triangle soup, line soup and text.
> This way you don't loop in octave or transmit information through a
> pipe, for instance.
>
> One thing I forgot to link in the previous email, regarding the
> IDE-octave communication. Apparently, embedding octave is very easy!
> http://octave.sourceforge.net/octave_embed.tar.gz. This means that
> communicating by pipes is harder!
>
> Also, about "politics" (don't flame me for my nomenclature!) I know
> that people are going to pull all kinds of ways (use GTK! use gnuplot!
> use FLTK! use python! Communicate with pipes! With CORBA!) but I think
> I get a lot more work done when I just pick something simple and stick
> with it, you guys that code a lot will understand me. If, as John
> implies, the octave project's eventually interested in merging a GUI
> or IDE officially, you guys can sort out whether the politics fit.
> It'll be GPL anyway, I don't have a choice.
>
> Of course, if the politics blow my way, it's probably a good thing
> because then I could offload one of the widgets to someone else.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Sébastien Loisel
>