Re: [Plplot-general] wingcc Freeze

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

On 2014-03-14 21:46-0000 John Duffy wrote:

> [.... D]id you see my second posting regarding the freeze occurring
when window events occur? I'm tending to think it is a window event
issue in the wingcc code. I did monitor window resources during my
program run and freeze, memory usage didn't appear to be a problem.

You might well be right.  I don't have enough wingcc or Windows
platform knowledge to follow up on that possibility, but perhaps
someone else here with that required knowledge can take a look at that.

> I'm using Windows only because I have to at the moment. I intend to
migrate to a Unix platform, which I am more familiar with, as soon as
possible.

Interesting.  In the remarks that follow I am likely "preaching to the
choir" for your case, but I am going to go ahead with those remarks
anyway in case others here are considering moving their PLplot-related
development from Windows to Linux or vice versa.

On Windows other interactive device options besides wingcc are the
xcairo, qtwidget, and wxwidgets devices if you are willing to try
binary downloads of the required dependencies (pango/cairo, Qt, and
wxwidgets libraries).  However, such Windows binary downloads are
often plagued by an inconsistent ABI or inconsistent dependencies, and
the only reliable way to work around those issues is to build all
those dependencies yourself with a consistent compiler.  That is one
of the motivations for the epa_build project that is described in
cmake/epa_build/README.  Essentially all aspects of that project work
on Unix, and many aspects also work on Windows.  Thus, the epa_build
already has made possible an enhanced PLplot Windows experience.
However, the epa_build project is not yet ready for prime time on
Windows for the case of the pango/cairo and Qt PLplot dependencies
so the PLplot Windows platform still doesn't have all the
capabilities of the PLplot Linux platform.

Because of that current epa_build limitation, there is some motivation
(depending on what your other needs are) for moving your development
from Windows to Linux where the xcairo, qtwidget, wxwidgets, xwin, and
tk interactive PLplot devices are all available for you to try.  There
is normally no need to use epa_build for this case because all the
required dependencies of those devices are usually easy to install
from your Linux distro with results that have a consistent ABI and
consistent set of dependencies.  However, there is one obvious
exception where epa_build is also extremely useful on Linux
(especially "enterprise class" Linux); it allows PLplot developers to
try out the very latest versions of the PLplot dependencies if those
versions have not yet propagated to their Linux distribution.

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); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
__________________________

Linux-powered Science
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