Re: Policy question - to PM3D or not to PM3D?

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

(I'm cc'ing people directly because I'm not sure the attachment will
 make it onto the list)

> Or even (3): remove all #ifdef PM3D. Now, this functionality is an inherent
> part of gnuplot, so it does not make sense any longer to separate its source
> code pieces visually by #ifdef PM3D ... #endif.
> 
> Same for USE_ULIG_FILLEDBOXES, USE_ULIG_RELATIVE_BOXWIDTH, and maybe
> something more?

I have wanted to remove USE_ULIG_RELATIVE_BOXWIDTH since before
the 4.0 release. It protects a grand total of about 20 lines of code,
and half of those are just an additional test inside an existing if() statement.
There is no run-time penalty in memory use.

The code supporting USE_ULIG_FILLEDBOXES is slightly bigger, but not much.
Again there is no run-time penalty in memory use that I can see.

So yes, I would favor removing the  #ifdef and configuration options
for both of these.


Here are some size comparisons for different configuration options:

    text     data      bss      dec    hex filename
#-----------------------------------------------------------------------
  946764    83476    34016  1064256 103d40 gnuplot_default
  930054    83216    33888  1047158  ffa76 gnuplot_no_strings_histograms
  941086    81168    33984  1056238 101dee gnuplot_no_aed_regis_tek
  934260    83196    34016  1051472 100b50 gnuplot_nofilledboxes
  929010    83204    34016  1046230  ff6d6 gnuplot_noimage
  848734    78364    30816   957914  e9dda gnuplot_noimage_nopm3d
  688172    59708    14208   762088  ba0e8 gnuplot_termshortlist
  614196    54616    13920   682732  a6aec gnuplot_onedriveronly
  599186    55632    13504   668322  a32a2 gnuplot_nopm3d_termshortlist

These are respectively

- default configuration of current cvs (includes gd and pdf terminals)
- ./configure --disable-histograms --disable-stringvariables --disable-datastrings
- comment out some really old terminal drivers
- ./configure --disable-filledboxes
- ./configure --disable-with-image
- ./configure --disable-pm3d
- build only shortlist terminals (dumb epslatex/pslatex/post/pstex table x11)
- one terminal driver only (x11 dumb table)
- shortlist terminals and no pm3d no image


And a plot attached (which of course could not have been produced
if all these great options were disabled :-)  
*** NOTE LOG SCALE ON Y ***

As you can see, the code and data sizes are far more sensitive to
choice of terminal drivers than to the code configuration options.
Building without pm3d+image gains you 10% in size
Building without most of the other post-4.0 features gains about 2% 
Building with a short list of terminals gains you 28% in size

In the extreme case of an embedded environment with a fixed display,
the further reduction to a single terminal driver (I used x11
for convenience to test the size) gains you 36%


-- 
Ethan A Merritt       merritt@u.washington.edu
Biomolecular Structure Center
Mailstop 357742
University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195