Observations on working with Octave C++ code

[Daniel J Sebald]

Some observations of working with Octave C++ code...

1) I came across the "doxygen documentation", e.g.,

http://octave.sourceforge.net/doxygen/html/classchar_matrix.html

It is a nice summary of the classes and member functions, including a 
graphical hierarchy of parents and children classes along with fast 
links to other classes and member definitions.  I found this to be 
hugely helpful in speeding up the time it takes to understand Octave 
innards without having to hunt and peck for definitions in the actual 
source files.  (Why this documentation falls under Octave-Forge, I'm not 
exactly sure.  I mean, Octave-Forge uses Octave and doesn't concern 
itself with the insides of core Octave.  And how this documentation 
is/was generated, I'm not sure either.)

I suggest putting a link to this documentation somewhere in the 
developer page

http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/get-involved.html

or wiki

http://wiki.octave.org/Projects

E.g., "A good place to start for learning the structure of Octave's C++ 
code is this dOxygen documentation 
http://octave.sourceforge.net/doxygen/html/index.html.";

Generally, the C++ code looks nicely organized.  It takes a bit of time 
to understand what a member variable or function stands for, but 
eventually it becomes evident.

2) Along that same lines, one could include, e.g.,

"Another good reference for C++ concepts is http://www.cplusplus.com/, 
and in particular the documentation for the often-used C++ strings 
library http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/string/.";

3) I've found that building Octave after just tweaking the code in some 
C++ file is quite slow.  Is it simply the case that the linking is so 
big?  Are there a lot of libraries that have to be built?  That one 
minute or so of sitting while Octave assembles can really add up in 
terms of developer's time.  I try to multitask by doing something like 
reading email while Octave is linking, but that sort of interrupts the 
train of thought.

Dan