matplotlib-devel Mailing List for matplotlib

Matplotlib is quite nice, but I keep running into problems with the
actual display interface.
In some cases the plot window freezes and such when using it from a
debugger, or sometimes pylab.show() just never returns. Matlab's
plotting interface just never gave me so much trouble.
I think all these problems could be fixed if the display interface
were turned into a separate process that communicates with the Python
program using pipes or some other IPC mechanism. I used this
technique in a (C/C++) image debugging utility program I wrote
(http://www.billbaxter.com/projects/imdebug) and it works quite well.
The displayer is a separate process using a memory mapped file to
communicate with the main program. When the user's code calls the
"display_image" function, the data to display is copied to the memory
mapped file, the displayer process is sent a signal, and then the
displayer reads the data from the memory mapped file and displays it.
Because the displayer is a separate process, it never hangs, even if
the main app crashes or gets stuck at a break point or in an infinite
loop. And the displayer always owns its display loop completely, so
no nasty issues with who gets to run the wx.App event loop and when,
or with the single-gui-thread limitations you have with multithreaded
GUI apps.
Has anyone given thought to making matplotlib work in such a manner?
It would be hell to do in C or C++ I think, but with Python's
RPC libs I bet it wouldn't be so bad.
--bb

Matplotlib is quite nice, but I keep running into problems with the
actual display interface.
In some cases the plot window freezes and such when using it from a
debugger, or sometimes pylab.show() just never returns. Matlab's
plotting interface just never gave me so much trouble.
I think all these problems could be fixed if the display interface
were turned into a separate process that communicates with the Python
program using pipes or some other IPC mechanism. I used this
technique in a (C/C++) image debugging utility program I wrote
(http://www.billbaxter.com/projects/imdebug) and it works quite well.
The displayer is a separate process using a memory mapped file to
communicate with the main program. When the user's code calls the
"display_image" function, the data to display is copied to the memory
mapped file, the displayer process is sent a signal, and then the
displayer reads the data from the memory mapped file and displays it.
Because the displayer is a separate process, it never hangs, even if
the main app crashes or gets stuck at a break point or in an infinite
loop. And the displayer always owns its display loop completely, so
no nasty issues with who gets to run the wx.App event loop and when,
or with the single-gui-thread limitations you have with multithreaded
GUI apps.
Has anyone given thought to making matplotlib work in such a manner?
It would be hell to do in C or C++ I think, but with Python's
extensive RPC libs I bet it wouldn't be so bad.
Also, once you have that sort of remote operation set up, you can
think about crazy things like just using a web browser as the display
interface. Or remotely displaying graphs on other machines, if you
have some reason to want to do that.
--bb