[ANN] GSL Shell new beta release with anti-gran graphics module

[Francesco Abbate <gslshell@...>]

Hi all,

I'm glad to announce an exciting new beta release of GSL Shell that
include a module to produce beautiful anti-grain graphics. This new
module use the AGG library to provides graphics primitives for
producing beautiful plotting. For the moment the API is not complete
but I have already all the functions to cover 90% of typical user
needs for plotting functions. I'm planning also to develop an
higher-level module entirely written in Lua to provide more simple and
higher level plotting functions.

The graphics modules are available for Windows and Linux. Here the
link to download the source files and also windows binaries (it is the
0.9beta1 release):

https://savannah.nongnu.org/files/?group=gsl-shell

and the link to GSL Shell project:

https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/gsl-shell/.

You can test the plot module by charging the file 'examples/plot.lua'.

>From the technical point of view I was surprised to discover how
*good* is the AGG library, it is one on the most remarkable piece of
software I've ever seen. It is written in C++ and heavily uses
templates. The strong point of the library are:
- very elegant and clear code
- very clever interface design
- excellent performances in term of speed and quality
- it works flawless, out of the box, both on Windows and on linux (with g++)
- it does includes some excellent modules to provide platform abstraction for
  displaying graphs with X11 or Windows with exactly the same interface

At the beginning I was thinking to use "the GNU plotting utilities"
but I've abandoned this idea because
- this package does not provide any support to display graphics on Windows
- the project is not evolving since a long time
- no anti-grain support available
- the source code of the "graph" utility is really awful and can be
considered as a
  reference for "bad software design" (I've begun to work on this code
to adapt it
  but I soon abandoned the idea).

Otherwise, I'm using also the pthread library. While this is almost
trivial on linux I was surprised to discover that a good
implementation also exists on windows and it works out of the box:
http://sourceware.org/pthreads-win32/ .

I hope you will try the software and give me some feedback before the
official release.

Thank you very much in any case.

Best regards,
Francesco