Re: gnuplot slow on BIG files

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

Ethan Merritt wrote:
> On Saturday 11 June 2005 03:53 am, Robert Hart wrote:

>>You seem to be implying that we shouldn't be making any kinds of changes
>>to the core of gnuplot without being sure they will work on all of the
>>platforms that gnuplot has *historically* supported.

> We dropped support of 16-bit DOS when we released version 4.0.

Out of nothing but pure necessity combined with lack of user interest.
Since then, I've made progress in reviving it.  It takes some drastic 
measures to get there, though: not only will the postscript text blocks 
have to be moved to separate files, but I'd actually have to split 
graphics.c in half, because that module in itself is too large to be 
compiled on 16-bit platforms already.

> Furthermore, we knew how to fix the build problems but chose not to.

We knew how to fix some of them, not all.

> Let's also issue a call to any Amiga users, and if none turn up
> let's remove all the special casing for Amiga as well.

Careful what you ask for, there --- the chief proponent of Amiga has 
been Lars. ;-)

>  Support for obsolete platforms will be frozen at the last
>  gnuplot release for which there was evidence of an active user
>  community. People running archaic hardware should not be surprised
>  if they have to run less than state-of-the-art software on it.

"evidence of an active user community" would be a *very* strict 
criterion.  By that count, we'ld not be supporting anything but Linux, 
Windows and maybe MacOS X.  (Sorry, Petr, but one person doesn't make a 
community for OS/2).

> At worst that would fail to handle the Fortran D/Q format
> case.  This also is clearly an OS bug, and not something we
> should have to code around.

Actually, it's *exactly* the OS bugs we have to code around.  All other 
bugs can reasonably be avoided by asking people to upgrade some tool, 
library or whatnot, or maybe by replacing buggy OS-supplied tools by 
free replacements.  But neither we nor the typical user is in a position 
to upgrade an OS just to be able to run gnuplot on it.