Re: mx and C enigne API

[Paul Kienzle]

On Tue, Nov 11, 2003 at 10:15:23AM +0100, Bernd Kalbfuss wrote:
> Hi John,
> 
> after so many postings about interprocess communication I am just 
> puzzled. Simple question: is there any standard method available at the 
> moment that allows to control octave from a different process? If yes: 
> where is the documentation for it or where can I find some examples?
> Since nobody responded to my last message I will just ask again: what 
> about implementing the matlab mx and C engine API in octave? This would 
> help in two ways: 1st it would make external matlab functions portable, 
> 2nd this could provide an easy interface for any application that wants 
> to exchange data with octave. I would volunteer to do this. But I 
> definitely need more information about the current status of the project.

The place for this information is:

http://wiki.octave.org/wiki.pl?CategoryExternal

The quick answer is that many mx, mex and eng routines are available
from octave-forge.  You are more than welcome to extend them in
whichever way you need.

mat routines would be very convenient so that people can read octave files
from other applications without loading the octave interpreter.  Doing this
properly will require a reorganization of load-save so that it is
independent of liboctave and liboctinterp.

A while back I posted some code which extracts the bits of
octave out of toplevel.cc so that the read-eval loop can be 
in your own application.  I've modified it to make use of
octave's initialization code directly, but I didn't push it 
far enough to separate out the printing since it is just a 
proof of concept. 

You can find it here:

        http://octave.sf.net/octave_embed.tar.gz

As for the relative merits of sockets, pipes, threads and shared memory,
you are on your own.  All are possible in each operating system.

Paul Kienzle
address@hidden