octavede - a ide for octave

[John Swensen]

I have been working on an IDE for octave for an hour or two a week for 
the past 2 years or so.  Sometimes I have had stretches where little 
progress is made, but I think there is enough in place to let everyone 
know about it.  It is still probably pre-alpha, and now that I am a 
first year grad student I haven't had much time for anything other than 
classwork, but here it is none-the-less.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/octavede

I still don't have a web page up, just the project page and you will 
have to retrieve the sources from subversion.  I have a few screenshots 
up of what it looks like.  A while back I submitted a patch that had 
essentially been written by someone else and JWE pointed me to it.  I 
simply cleaned it up and made other changes the VTE maintainer wanted 
and resubmitted.  In essence, it allows VTE to "swallow" up the PIDs of 
child processes so there isn't a process shown for the IDE *and* for 
octave, just one for the combination.

Currently the method for interacting with Octave in *not* thread safe.  
I simply check to see if the interpreter isn't in a command and then 
pull the history and variable information.  I haven't had it crash on me 
a single time since I put multiple check in at different points to 
determine whether the interpreter is in a command, but probability says 
that I can guarantee it will happen at some point.  I did however run 
the Octave2.m benchmark from sciviews.org with and without the IDE and 
there was a 10 millisecond difference for the cumulative runtime, so I 
think it is safe to say that the IDE doesn't add a lot of overhead.  One 
of the main reasons I am posting to this list is to probe the waters 
about adding some hooks into the interpreter such that after a command 
returns to the top level or hits a break point that information queried 
by the IDE can be pushed into some thread-safe object for later 
retrieval by the IDE.

The editor still needs a lot of work, and I personally would like to 
give it emacs key-bindings, or even just embed the Xemacs widget in a 
window that is part of octavede.  If anyone is a GtkSourceView wizard, I 
am not and could use help.

I don't have a good list of dependencies off hand, but you can look in 
the configure.ac file for a list and any recent version of the autotools 
will let you know the exact packages that are missing.  I have tested it 
on x86 Ubuntu, PowerPC Mac, and IntelMac and they seem to work fine.  It 
ran on cygwin/X11 with the GTK stuff from cygwinports a little while 
back, but I don't have a Windows machine anymore, so I can't test it.

Any questions or comments can be sent to me directly or posted on the 
sourceforge forums and I will try to answer them in a timely manner.

John Swensen