Re: [OctDev] tk_octave problems

[Paul K. <pki...@us...>]

Mark,

tk_octave is mostly unsupported.

The biggest issue was that it required a version of octave
compiled with pthreads, which would make deployment of
my package more troublesome.   Instead I investigated
other solutions.   For now I'm using sockets with listen and
extra/soctcl from octave-forge.  This is adequate for my needs,
but is considerably slower than it could be.

If you decide to pursue tk_octave, please bear in mind that
the code is not safe as it is currently written.   Since octave's
reference counting classes do not use semaphores, there
is a small window in which a task switch could delete
an array in octave while tcl wanted to access it.  The simplest
solution to this problem would be to use a separate namespace
for shared variables which have proper threaded access
semantics.

You may want to consider unifying soctcl and tk_octave syntax.
That way you can use network transparency if needed, but
use threads and shared memory for speed.

The soctcl interface is not as good as it could be.   I find
that from tcl, I want some variables in octave to be scoped
according to the current function scope in Tcl (and possibly
persistent), and others to be global.  Some sort of namespace
parameter for the octave eval command would do wonders.
It would be easy enough to implement in octave by associating
a symbol table with each namespace.

An alternative to tk_octave is to embed octave in tcl.  A lot of
the mechanics of this are already available.  Fundamentally
this is no different from embedding tcl in octave, but in practice
it is easier to extend tcl/tk with numeric support than it will be
to extend octave with gui support.  As a bonus, making octave
embeddable in tcl will remove the cygwin dependency in
windows.

Paul Kienzle
pki...@us...

On Apr 22, 2004, at 11:45 AM, Mark P. Esplin wrote:

> I tried out tk_octave and noticed a couple of problems.  First on my 
> system
> the tk_matrix demo wouldn't work until I added:
>
> set auto_path "$auto_path /usr/lib"
>
> to tk_matrix.tcl so that it could find the BLT package.  "wish" 
> doesn't have
> any trouble finding the BLT package.
>
> When I start the tcl/tk interpreter from octave with tk_interp my CPU 
> free
> time drops to 0.  This is before I do any other commands. Why does the
> interpreter require so much CPU time?
>
> tk_entry.m doesn't work.  Line 100 is "@@ -98,6 +98,7 @@" which looks 
> like it
> must of gotten left over from a patch attempt.
>
> The document string on tk_end says "See also: tk_start, ..." which 
> must have
> supposed to have been tk_interp.
>
>                          -Mark Esplin
>
>
>
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