Re: GSoC project: new graphics backend

[Arseniy Lartsev]

On Thursday 26 March 2009 18:30:06 John W. Eaton wrote:
> I'm not sure that we want to add vtk as a dependency for Octave, at
> least not by default.
>
> I don't think that graphics is something that should be done in add-on
> packages for Octave.  It seems to me that people will expect graphics
> to work more or less the same in all versions of Octave, regardless of
> the OS they are using.  That's why we have been working to add
> graphics properties and an OpenGL renderer to Octave.  If you want to
> help improve graphics in Octave, then please help us to improve the
> existing OpenGL renderer.
Fine, I can use this renderer. But good renderer is not enough, what I need is 
integrating plotting system into IDE with convenient GUI. I'm going to start 
it as a separate backend, but it could be included into Octave source tree at 
any time (though I doubt that developers will agree to add Qt as a dependency 
for Octave).

By the way, I looked into the code of this OpenGL renderer and saw that going 
through Octave's internal graphic-related data structures is not separated 
from the actual rendering, so there's no easy way to replace OpenGL based 
rendering with something else. So, what about splitting this renderer into two 
parts: the renderer itself which does not know anything about Octave data 
structures and provides some API, and universal rendering module that walks 
through data structures and leaves actual rendering for the other module? I 
could do this.

Arseniy

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