Re: [Plplot-devel] Dynamic drivers on cygwin (close, but not there)

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

On 2006-10-18 09:07+0200 Arjen Markus wrote:

> Sometime ago, Geoffrey posted his idea of an alternative implementation of
> dynamic drivers. I replied that it looked - the method at least - a lot like 
> the
> implementation of "stubs" in Tcl. These work on all platforms that Tcl is
> available on. Perhaps we should start looking at that? That does not seem
> to involve the complexities of libtool/libltdl.

Fundamentally, libplplot will still have to dynamically load the plug-in
devices no matter how those devices are implemented. (Otherwise, we are back
to static devices that are part of libplplot that are all automatically
loaded along with the rest of libplplot by the run-time loader at run time
regardless of whether the user needs all devices or not.)

Given that dynamic loading must be done, the problem is that each platform
typically has a different API for dynamic loading.  libltdl solves this
cross-platform issue by wrapping all API's in a standard API which libplplot
calls. There are other free libraries (for example, Trolltech has QLibrary,
[http://doc.trolltech.com/3.0/qlibrary.html] which KDE has recently switched
to) which do the same job, but I think fundamentally we must continue to use
libltdl or some equivalent to dynamically load plug-in devices in a
cross-platform way regardless of how those devices are implemented.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the Yorick front-end to PLplot (yplot.sf.net); the
Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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