Improved MEX Compilation

[jjangsangy]

Features

• Autodetect installed MATLAB bin directory with get_matlab_bin() function.
• messenger is a fully fledged helper module for pymatbridge
  • Meaning you can call code from messenger just like any module.

# From Root Directory
>>> import messenger
>>> messenger.get_matlab_bin()
'/Applications/MATLAB_R2014a.app/bin'

• messenger module is also a callable application, and is a direct replacement for make.py.

>>> python -m messenger --help

usage: messenger [-h] [--static] {matlab,octave}

positional arguments:
  {matlab,octave}  target to be built

optional arguments:
  -h, --help       show this help message and exit
  --static         staticly link libzmq

etc...

• Code is more DRY
  • local.cfg files are deprecated. Now only single authoritative config.ini file in root directory.
• Use get_matlab_env() for inspecting underlying installed matlab architecture.
• Use fetch_zmq() to download libzmq source code

Still not Implemented

• Code for comparing against python, host and matlab architectures.
• Dynamic linking of libzmq headers and library using DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH DYLD_FRAMEWORK_PATH.
• Updated Documentation

[jjangsangy]

On first try! Booya!

[blink1073]

Pretty awesome job @jjangsangy! I'll let @isbadawi chime in since he's a fellow builder.

[isbadawi]

Should be cfg.read(config). Can't build Octave because of this.

There are two other places where you read config.ini. You should probably reuse this function everywhere.

[isbadawi]

Also this used to return a dict. The octave path uses % get_config() and this won't work with a ConfigParser instance.

[isbadawi]

Lots of little nits, but OK overall. I do like the one config file better.

[jjangsangy]

Ya, thanks a lot for going through and finding all those mistakes. Always nice to get code reviewed!

Went ahead and refactored out all the details.

get_config() now actually returns a dict for the host platform. I just pass that around now instead of having every function re-calculate those values.

[jjangsangy]

Crap! forgot a comma!

[mmagnuski]

This will reintroduce a problem I had running pymatbridge with 32 bit python on 64 bit Windows.
If you are running 32 bit python on 64 bit windows sys.maxsize > 2**32 gives False while platform.machine().endswith('64') returns True.

[jjangsangy]

@mmagnuski Thanks for bringing that up!

Planning on dealing with that soon. The issue is that we actually have 3 different architectures.

1. Operating System Architecture
2. Python Architecture
3. Matlab Architecture

I just built get_matlab_env() which will return the MATLAB arch, so now all we have to do is figure out which combinations of these 3 are okay to run under.

[blink1073]

IMO, the only one that matters for the mex file is the Matlab Architecture, which must in turn match the ZMQ Architecture.

[jjangsangy]

@blink1073 But using a 64-bit compiled MEX running on a 32-bit Python interpreter is bound to be bad right? I'm not too familiar with the build process for windows so I'll have to go look into this one.

ZMQ Architecture? Or do you mean the version of the ZMQ installation?

[blink1073]

My point is that we start Matlab in a subprocess and talk to it over sockets, so it doesn't matter if the architectures match.
There are 64bit and 32bit downloads for ZMQ on Windows, for example.

[jjangsangy]

Ahh I see, that makes sense.