Re: Mac OS X driver. [Was: Please check new TBOOLEAN...]

[Hans-Bernhard B. <br...@ph...>]

On Fri, 26 Mar 2004, Per Persson wrote:

> It is currently in alpha testing and I discussed the subject with Lars
> Hecking and it was decided to wait until after the 4.0 release. However,
> the new driver has matured rapidly and is much cleaner than the old
> driver and supports more gnuplot features.

It's hard to make a decision on such imprecise information.  Maybe you
should post the current state of that driver somewhere, including an
explanation why you think it's better, what new features it supports, and
so on.  Otherwise, we'll leave just stick with Lars' decision to postpone
it.

> I'd also like to patch command.c to fix a problem with the 
> semi-automatic garbage collection in Objective-C that could lead to 
> excessive memory use during long running sessions.

ObjC code in the middle of the native C stuff might be bad news.  At 
minimum, I'ld like to see this isolate to a separate source file, which
a plain C compiler won't even look at.

> What it does is to set up and tear down an "object pool"  for every 
> loop through the event cycle. Placing it here is based on the 
> assumption that all calls to the driver is guaranteed to be made 
> through this single function. 

"Through" this function: almost certainly.  But I would think this could
more sensibly be put into your term->graphics() and term->text(). Those
are called once per plot generated, which really should be sufficient for
your needs.  It'd also have the benefit of placing these Chunks in a place
that already is out of sight of non-Objective-C compilations.

-- 
Hans-Bernhard Broeker (br...@ph...)
Even if all the snow were burnt, ashes would remain.