[mcclim-devel] question about curves and formatting graphs

[rpgoldman at real-time.com]

It was interesting to me that the grapher Paolo pointed to last time
did NOT use format-graph-from-roots.  I don't know whether this was
because that grapher was built before format-graph-from-roots was
generally available (I think it's always been in CLIM), or because the
graph layout algorithm in format-graph-from-roots is not very amenable
to having the user intervene into graph layout.

It might be instructive to compare format-graph-from-roots with the
grapher that appears in Garnet, which is based on a cells-like
constraint architecture.  In that framework there are edge objects
that are constrained to be attached to points on graph nodes.  I don't
see how one could really build a user-modifiable graph w/o such
objects.  On the other hand, I'm not sure how one could introduce such
entities, since CLIM doesn't necessarily easily admit for propagation
cycles.  I.e., such objects would only work in panes with particular
sorts of display-functions.

BTW, on a dual SMP 3G with 1G of RAM last night, I tried to layout a
graph with approx 5K nodes, and McCLIM went into GC thrashing and took
the lisp process down (which I take to be an accomplishment).  I hope
to be able to have some time to run the profiler and try to figure out
what might be optimized --- I haven't tweaked my compiler settings at
all, so this might simply be badly-compiled iterative code eating the
stack...

It's too early, and I'm probably rambling, so I'll sign off...