I'll take this as an opportunity to post a small status report for
bølge, my VCD viewer.

On Thu, 2006-10-19 at 17:44 -0400, Nicholas wrote:

> Also, a point of caution: the VCD file is ballooning in size. It is now
> approx. 450MB. I couldn't open it in GTKWave to analyze waveforms

Ouch!

> because while it did load, the UI was so slow that it still hadn't
> redrawn the screen after 30 min! I resorted to looking at the
> scanimage.ppm file instead.

How much RAM do you have?

Bølge still doesn't draw things right on the screen but pretty much
everything else is in place.  I used the testDVI.vcd file as a test that
the memory usage didn't get too big.  On my machine it got to be 188MB,
which used to require about 1G to represent for my VCD parser.  I got
that down to 400 MB last night and since I have 1G RAM it worked fine
without thrashing.

I think I am currently about 22 darcs commits away from a usable v0.1
release (there are a bit over 200 commits already).

Bølge v0.1 will probably require 1.2GB to represent your current VCD
file :(

I have a caching scheme planned (and mostly implemented) which will cut
this down to less than the size of the VCD file.  It should be possible
to view your new, bigger VCD file comfortably on a 256 MB RAM machine.
But that's for v0.2, I'm afraid.

In order to make the user interface really snappy, I'll need another
cache, this time for the drawing widget.  The cache described above is
for navigation of the VCD data structure.  The one for the drawing
widget records the outline of the curves drawn in the signal widget so
navigation of the VCD data structure isn't necessary for redraws.
v0.3 will probably have such a draw cache + threaded I/O (almost
everything is already prepared for this).

For the curious:
http://vax64.dk/bølge/
http://vax64.dk/b%c3%b8lge/

The tarball won't be up until the 0.1 release but the darcs repository
works fine.

-Peter

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