Re: Plot widgets

["Eric M. Monsler" <emonsler beamreachnetworks com>]

Ralph Walden wrote:
> 
> Folks,
> 
> Does anyone have any experience with using the GtkPlot
> widget (from GtkExtra) on an SGI?
> 
> My first impression of GtkExtra is that it is buggy and
> slow.  The development does not seem very active.
> 
> Doesn't anyone else use GTK need plotting widgets?
> Is this the "official" package of such widgets?


I use GtkExtra for an in-house data display program.  It works fine for
my plots, tested up to ~10k points.  It will do 200 points updated twice
a second with no problem, running on a Sun (forget what, 450 MHz and
boatloads of RAM) and displaying on NT PC's (800 MHz typically) running
Hummingbird's X server.  At 5 times a second it drops occasional updates
(I poll for data from a timer, so if I fall behing I just miss a poll.)

I use only the GtkPlot stuff, none of the other things in the library. 
No bugs or memory leaks that I am aware of.  There used to be, but
around 99.15 to 99.16 a lot got fixed.  We were using an X server from
Exceed, which grew in memory usage when updating plots; no idea whether
Gtk, GtkPlot, or the X-server itself was at fault, but no such memory
blleding was seen with the Sun X, Linux XFree86, or the Hummingbird
product.

It's a little quirky, I have problems positioning axis labels, etc.,
such that they look nice; my app is far from commercial-level
beautiful.  But I did clone the gtkrealtime demo and get my application
plotting in short order.

My biggest beef is that the documentation is near-zero, and the code is
largely uncommented.  When I did have to go in and figure out something
about how tick/grid spacing was handled, it was a chore to read,
although once I did understand it the code seemed to make sense and be
very reasonable.

The primary developer, Adrian Fenguin (spelling?) has been very
responsive to questions on the list (I think he's in the process of
moving, though, right now).  Based on the changelog, I think that there
is more development than the mailing list would indicate.  Maybe
discussion happens on the Scigraphica list.

HTH,

Eric