Move Makie Support to QMLMakie

[steffenhaug]

This is probably not quite ready for a merge, but I'm starting a PR so we have a place to discuss where to go from here, and for visibility in case someone wants to play around with it or help out.

This PR moves the Makie Support to a new package, QMLMakie, as suggested in the roadmap
and discussed in #206.

This has a number of benefits:

• Decoupling the Makie integration from the QML version
• Possibility of compat bounds
• No need to rely on janky loading of GLMakie which breaks PackageCompiler.jl

As it is, I basically just copied the code from makie_support.jl verbatim and made the necessary changes injlqml to initialize Makie Support in a separate JlCxx module, so that can be wrapped by QMLMakie.jl. There is still a lot of work to do before QMLMakie can be registered, but simple examples already work:

[barche]

Thanks, tried it out and it works beautifully. Some comments:

• Could you split the commits in this PR in one commit to fix the white space consistency and one commit that has the actual change?
• steffenhaug/QMLMakie should probably be named steffenhaug/QMLMakie.jl
• In your QMLMakie package, the module is named QtMakie but that should be QMLMakie

The last two points are of no infulence on this PR of course.

[steffenhaug]

Thanks, tried it out and it works beautifully. Some comments:

Glad to hear :-)

Could you split the commits in this PR in one commit to fix the white space consistency and one commit that has the actual change?

Yeah, will do! I accidentally made the commit before i noticed the LSP had completely blown out the diff :-p

steffenhaug/QMLMakie should probably be named steffenhaug/QMLMakie.jl

Agreed!

In your QMLMakie package, the module is named QtMakie but that should be QMLMakie

Oh yeah, nice catch. Thanks!

[steffenhaug]

I ran JuliaFormatter on all the files in src while I was at it. That made for quite a large change technically unrelated to the PR. Let me know if that isn't desirable.

Also, if you have an opinion on style, we could add a JuliaFormatter config file to the project, so everyone is on the same page. As is, I just ran it with the default settings.

[Larbino1]

Hi @steffenhaug. Was wondering if you're still pursuing this? Thinking about starting a project using QML.jl and running into issues with compat with GLMakie. Seems like this would fix the issue.

[steffenhaug]

Not really. I'm interested, but I hit some snags trying to get QMLMakie to support modern Makie versions, to the point where I could not justify the time investment on the clock, where I had a use case for it.

Even though embedding GLMakie is not that complicated in principle (as demonstrated by the ImGui embedding, the code is quite short), I have not been able to get modern Makie versions to render anything from a callback in QML, and I'm also not exactly sure what the problem is. Makie is not designed to run in multithreaded contexts, and I suspect that it doesn't play nicely with Qt's runtime.

I was hoping to get at least a proof of concept going before publishing anything, because publishing QMLMakie with a dependency on Makie 0.17 is silly, and alas I had not had time to work on this any further.

[Larbino1]

Thank you for taking the time to respond - I understand

[tetrakai1]

Even though embedding GLMakie is not that complicated in principle (as demonstrated by the ImGui embedding, the code is quite short), I have not been able to get modern Makie versions to render anything from a callback in QML, and I'm also not exactly sure what the problem is. Makie is not designed to run in multithreaded contexts, and I suspect that it doesn't play nicely with Qt's runtime.

How far did you get? In general, what is the furthest progress anyone has made in getting this to work: https://docs.makie.org/stable/explanations/backends/glmakie#embedding

Eg, has anyone gotten an empty plot (window, screen, figure, idk the correct term here) to show up without error?