Online Developer Meeting (2021-03-23)

Todays topicsEdit

Use "new" OpenGL code path
- Nice overview by User:Hg200
- Likely to make plotting faster (more efficient methods to move data to graphics card)
- Does not solve "double precision" problem, scaling must happen on Octave side even with new OpenGL code path
Consult professional OpenGL developer to review code
- General agreement to spend Octave project money on this

jwe can create dummy tree-elements
- Problem if values are evaluated, the "right" action must be done
Can those validation statements come at arbitrary positions or only at the beginning of the file?

GUI terminal widget, https://octave.discourse.group/t/new-command-window-widget/501 (jwe's patch!)
Of special interest for MS Windows users
Unify widget for all OSes
Make jwe's patch a configurable options for testing (nothing to use productively yet)
Need to implement own pager (alternatively: scroll bar only)
Better responsibility delegation between GUI and interpreter
- Big matrix output: interpreter could ask GUI to print big matrix, GUI could confirm with user, etc.
- Formatting (colors, URLs, etc.) could be done by the GUI. Interpreter does not need to know about window-width, etc.

"Ditch" old UNIX system functions (e.g. popen)
- Move to package?
- compose a list of functions that are candidates for removal from core Octave. See: Moving POSIX system call and library functions out of core Octave
performance of symbol lookup
- use std::unordered_map, rather than std::map to increase performance (e.g. of interpreter lookups)
- Potentially implement "import" keyword? That would probably slow down symbol lookup some more.
Replace custom reference counters with implementation using std::shared_ptr
- Some instances are more difficult to replace. jwe will post something about this on the discourse forum.
favor C++ std-library functions over gnulib where possible
- Maybe require C++14 or C++17? See: Using C++17 features
improve HDF5 integration
- Add "wrapper" for libhdf5 functions in Octave's scripting language.
- Key to support latest Matlab file formats. Try to implement in the interfaces for that format in .m file functions.
- Some developers very interested in this!

jwe will a single Discourse thread to ask for tests in Matlab
- Old Discourse threads many maintainers receive notifications.

Similar to Matlab online
There are already existing services
- https://cocalc.com/doc/octave.html
- https://octave-online.net/
In general Jupyter-Notebook based solutions are already highly developed
Running an own service lacks of manpower and financial resources

Split Octave manual https://octave.org/doc/latest into
- Function reference, like Octave Forge https://octave.sourceforge.io/docs.php
  - Need knowledge how it was created (Kai looks at this again)
  - Once succeeded, hosted at https://octave.org/doc/
- Usage manual (like the current one, more detailed, without @docstrings)

Automatically reschedule the meeting monthly (Kai suggests on Discourse)
MXE Octave branches and buildbots
Strategy for transition to string class syntax (incompatible to current double-quoted character vectors in Octave)?
Allow using more modern C++ dialects (C++17 STL std::filesystem or boost::filesystem)?