From octave-maintainers-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu Mon Nov 10 10:49:59 2003
Subject: Re: Shared memory interface to Octave
From: Andy Adler <adler at site dot uottawa dot ca>
To: Russell Standish <R dot Standish at unsw dot edu dot au>
cc: jswensen at intergate dot com, <octave-maintainers@bevo.che.wisc.edu>
Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2003 11:49:37 -0500 (EST)

On Mon, 10 Nov 2003, Russell Standish wrote:

> I don't see why you need to use shared memory? Surely opening a pipe
> connection between the Octave's standard input and your control
> stream, and another one to its standard output suffices to communicate
> between you GUI process and the octave process.
>
> The pipe construct can be easily converted to a distributed memory
> model by means of ssh or similar ilk. Pipes are also far easier to
> program than shared memory segments.

There are a few tricks in using pipes to control Octave. You
may wish to look at my Inline::Octave perl module which uses
this technique.

The other advantage you get is portability - it works on win32
without modification.

I just did a quick test, and on my PIV 1.4Ghz laptop running W2k,
I'm getting tranfers of 800kB/s (including perl and octave
object construction overhead)

Andy