GAMGI project: Projects

# Projects

- Scientific
- Technical
- Legal

These are medium and long-term projects, regarding technical topics, that we aim to implement futurely.

### Implementation of gamgi_engine_malloc and gamgi_engine_free

For the sake of code control, independence and maintenance, GAMGI uses only pure AINSI C code for everything, except the graphics code, which uses only standard OpenGL calls (no Mesa specific calls) and the user interface code that uses Glib/GDK/GTK calls. In particular, GAMGI uses only AINSI C in its inner engine, which means malloc and free.

To improve memory management efficiency, avoiding to allocate many times small amounts of memory, which may waste time doing these slow memory operations and produce unused chunks of memory, it would be important to allocate memory for several objects of each kind at once, keep them in a stack, when the stack is empty create more objects, usually the double, when the objects are freed, put them back in the stack, etc...

### Definition and implementation of a GAMGI scripting language

Every single command handled by dialog windows and mouse actions should be emulated using only a command line scripting language.

This is important, because it will allow us to describe entire working sessions in log files, so loading those files we will be able to recreate all the work done before, and changing the log files will allow us to automatically create different working sessions.

### Implementation of GAMGI multi-tasking infrastructure

In the future GAMGI must allow users to do more than one operation at a time. This is important when an operation takes too long to complete, and in animation, for example.

The solution is probably to use threads instead of multi-processes or other multitasking techniques, but that must be carefully analysed first.

### Documentation available in Latex format

Producing good documentation explaining not just how things work but also why they work that way should always rank high in the list of priorities of any self-respecting computer package. For a project run by volunteers, as GAMGI, this is even more critical, because commercial books are generally not available and programmers tend to prefer writing code than documentation. We believe that lack of documentation is a serious bug in a program and major efforts should be done to avoid it.

GAMGI documentation is currently available only in XHTML format. We should have at least Latex and PS versions, created from a single master, using some of the free format converters currently available, in various stages of development. Moreover, the documentation development and format translation could be controlled by makefiles, exactly as code.

### GAMGI internationalization

GAMGI is currently an english-only program. Although GAMGI is primarily a scientific tool, it can also be used to great advantage to teach and attract interest for such matters as chemistry, physics, materials science, geology, etc. However, many of the potential students have only a marginal knowledge of the english language and it would be a shame it they couldn't use GAMGI due to their poor english proficiency.

There are two ways to handle this problem:

1. To prepare and maintain different GAMGI versions, one for each language.
2. To prepare and maintain a single GAMGI version, with menu-driven options to allow the user to choose on-the-fly which language to apply.

The first option is much easier, because different languages require different space and even orientation (for example in arabic) to give the same information, and it is therefore tremendously difficult to prepare dialog windows that fit all languages at once. For western-languages we could probably go with the second, more elegant solution, but for Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, etc. we feel that the first solution might be the most sensible.

To support non-western languages, such as Chinese, Japanese and Arabic, GAMGI must understand Unicode, the international standard to represent characters for any kind of live or dead language. Unicode functionality has been implemented by PANGO, a free GPL library, which will be used in GAMGI to represent all characters that are not described by the good old 7-bit ASCII standard.
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