Hi David: I just did a big revamp/update of the PLplot code. If I knew
what to do, I'd likely be familiar enough with the code to do it!
What did you have in mind?
Regards,
Doug
On Sat, 14 May 2011, David Mertens wrote:
Hello everybody -
I recently pulled in the pthreading patch that John just pushed. I am
blown away that John was able to go deep into the internals and make
automated pthreading work without any additional user effort. Amazing!
The standard tests compiled and ran on my laptop. I then ran the tests
with forced pthreading using (in bash)
$ PDL_AUTOPTHREAD_TARG=4 PDL_AUTOPTHREAD_SIZE=0 make --no-print-directory test
All of these passed, too. However, PLplot's tests *should not* have
passed. PLplot's C-implementation uses a global state machine and the
low-level plotting commands thread over piddle arguments. I don't
believe it's possible for that to be pthread-safe. However, there are
no tests to check against this, since until now all PDL threading has
run on a single pthread. I don't believe this is likely to cause
trouble with PLplot from most use cases. John explicitly recommends
against a pthread size of 0, and a pthread size of 1 refers to 1
megabyte of data. (Who would try plotting megabytes of data on one
plot?) However, almost certainly somebody is going to set a pthread
size of 0 in their environment variables, just for fun, and then plots
using a PLOTTYPE of POINTS and with various colors will inexplicably
begin to fail.
Perhaps I will add the NoPthread flag to all the PLplot bindings.
However, it's been a while since I've dug through the PLplot code, so
if somebody knows what they're doing, feel free to beat me to it. :-)
David
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