awk and graphics

[Miriam English]

Does anybody know some simple, fast, screen display extension that awk
can use?

I've been fiddling around with some of my old cellular automata
programs and have translated them to a few languages, including awk. I
haven't found any way to output graphics to the screen directly from
awk, so I've made it write to a .pbm image file. The great advantage of
this is that pbm is an ascii format, and easy to write to from awk.
(I've attached a pbm file of a cellular automaton, and another converted
to png in case you can't view pbm. It is an old format.)

I previously made a small python program that wrote to the screen using
John Zelle's graphics.py library which sits on top of tkinter. (This
is all on Linux.) I was surprised to find it took 12 minutes to render
a 256x192 pixel image. That was more than twice as long as the 5
minutes my ancient Tandy Color Computer (CoCo) emulator running at full
speed. (At original speed the CoCo would take a bit more than an hour.)

What was even more surprising to me is that awk writing directly to a
pbm file took less than a tenth of a second to create the same image.

When I rewrote the python program to output to a pbm image file too, it
took a little more than a tenth of a second -- much faster than writing
to the screen, but awk is still faster. :)

I have found awkGL https://github.com/takubo/awkGL but it doesn't
compile on my machine and I don't know enough about C to fix it. Also
OpenGL feels like overkill. I really only need to set and query pixels.

I also found awk-glib https://github.com/patsie75/awk-glib which is a
cunning way to use ANSI graphics to generate pictures from awk, but the
results are of course very low resolution. I could run it from a
terminal set to a very small font size, but it's not really what I'm
looking for.

Unfortunately there are some other experiments I want to do in which
being able to see the image update in real time is a big advantage.

Anybody know of something I can use?

Thanks,

 - Miriam

-- 
There are two wolves and they're always fighting.
One is darkness and despair. The other is light and hope.
Which wolf wins?
Whichever one you feed.
  -- Casey in Brad Bird's movie "Tomorrowland"

ca-rule30-pbm-converted-to-png.png
Description: PNG image

ca-rule30.pbm
Description: Portable bitmap