Octave and IDE communication

[John W. Eaton]

On 29-Oct-2007, Michael Goffioul wrote:

| During a discussion I had with a guy iinterested in IDE stuffs for octave,
| the discussion went about how octave and the IDE should communicate.
| John Swensen already made a proposal for this, in the form of an
| octave_server class that collects informations from octave when it is
| idle and allow the IDE to access them in a thread-safe way. This of
| course assumes that the IDE and octave runs in the same process,
| but in separate threads.
| 
| When octave runs in its own process, you need some additional
| communication channel between octave and the IDE. This is the
| reason of this mail. Provided that the IDE sets up a terminal
| emulation where octave runs in, I thought it could be doable to
| reuse the terminal channel to implement IDE/octave communication.
| 
| In practice, what I had in mind would look like this:
| 1) when the IDE wants to send something to octave, it uses the
| terminal emulation to send the data using some pre-defined (unbound)
| key sequence; this command is then only read by octave when the
| readline code is active, in idle state; by definition, this is synchronous
| with octave thread
| 2) when octave wants to send something to the IDE, it uses its stdout
| to send a pre-defined (unbound) escape sequence to the terminal
| emulation (which is then responsible to interpret it).
| 
| This scheme does not need to set up an additional communication
| channel and is only active when octave is idle. OTOH, this also
| imply code overhead in octave (to catch and interpret the commands)
| and the terminal emulation. This also imply the definition of a kind of
| protocol for the IDE communication. This also would work whether
| octave runs in its own thread of in its own process.
| 
| What do you think about this? Does this sound stupid?

My feeling is that for any IDE to really be efficient and effective,
it should be running in the same process as Octave (though probably in
a separate thread) so that it has on-demand access to all the internal
state of Octave that it needs rather than having to send signals or
whatever to get it.

jwe