Bill Okubo, product manager for IDL at ITT VIS, gave an overview of the roadmap for the next few versions of IDL at the VISualize 2009 meeting in Washington, DC last week.
I’ll list the highlights from my perspective below, but I believe Bill’s presentation should be available from the ITT VIS website soon (here’s the link to the shorter presentation given last fall at the IDL User Group meeting in Boulder). For IDL 7.1:
- 24-bit color PostScript in direct graphics
- command line for Windows
- multibyte text support for object graphics
- iTools procedural API
- interactive opening of data files from Workbench
- drag and drop visualizations
- plugin update site wizard
- enchancements to Workbench project build process
- new image processing filters for noise reduction and image restoration
Beyond IDL 7.1 (see the diagram above for when these are planned for release):
- modern interactive graphics
- modern language features (associative arrays, lists, operator overloading)
- modern UI toolkit
- “Workflow Solution to visually drive user defined workflows” (I believe this is integrating tools to do common tasks into the Workbench)
So what would you like to see in IDL?
I’m hoping to post more about the seminar over the next few days.
April 20th, 2009 at 7:27 pm
As a new user of IDL, and one relatively familar with Visual Basic.net, I sincerely hope IDL incorporates as many of the language features and capabilities of .net languages (especially query) features ASAP. These range from many simple additions to the language, such as a ‘for each do’ clause and case sensitivity to much more advanced query tools (such as something similar to LINQ) to significantly enhanced text creation and manipulation abilities. I like IDL very much, but it is quite cumbersome (at least relatively speaking) to produce good looking and/or complex documents that include data. Also, I think the capability to open and produce as many different data formats as possible is essential and should be a top priority. I am looking forward to IDL 7.1 very much.
April 20th, 2009 at 7:50 pm
Just to clarify a few things:
I think IDL is great. I love the “functional programming” aspects of the language that make it so succinct, as well as the relative ease of producing plots, etc. And, I am not suggesting that IDL should become more of a .net type of language. IDL and VB.net (and Java, C#, etc.) aes, re used for different purposes – for the most part. But, I strongly believe IDL would greatly benefit from having some of the basic language constructs (especially loopng – such as while…do, do…until, and several others) available in VB. Exception handling, I believe is also very important, and more options need to be available to the IDL user. The ability to access .net, Matlab, and perhaps some other libraries would be awesome. Yes, it’s a long and probably dificult list, but it would make an already excellent analysis language unbeatable.
April 20th, 2009 at 8:10 pm
I think a foreach type loop would be handy; it would shorten the phase I have to type a million times a day: “for i = 0L, n_elements(data) – 1L do” down to “foreach d in data do”. I believe Ronn Kling mentioned that in his talk about what he would like to see in IDL. He also mentioned better exception handling, like the try/catch mechanism in Python.
I didn’t mention file formats, but there was some updating the version of currently supported formats. For IDL 7.1, we basically got those as soon as they were ready, appearing in 7.0.3. There are some CSV text file convenience routines appearing in 7.1. There are also more updated planned for IDL 7.2, but I don’t know of any actually new formats being supported.
To address a couple other of your points, IDL does have while..do and repeat..until loops. Case-insensitivity is probably here to stay since it would break backwards compatibility.
I’m not familiar with LINQ; I will have to do some research on it. If you are looking for a way to create complex documents with data, take a look at these posts about my template class.
April 23rd, 2009 at 7:48 pm
I was curious if anyone reading has used gpulib with IDL. If anyone has, I’d love to hear what they thought or think of it. I know very little about GPU computing, so this may be a silly question, but will using GPULIB help when faster data transfers are needed (in addition to processing)? Is data transfer quicker when using the GPU? Also, will ITTVIS release new documentation for 7.1? There’s certain sections I’d like to print, but not twice:) Thanks for your reply in advance!
April 23rd, 2009 at 8:56 pm
Check out Mort Canty’s blog for someone using GPULib with IDL-ENVI.
Data transfer is a bottleneck for the GPU. Generally speaking, you want to transfer some chunk of data to GPU memory and do as many calculations as possible before transferring the result back to main memory.
The IDL 7.1 documentation will certainly have modifications (depending on what sections you are looking at).
May 11th, 2009 at 10:45 am
[…] about the upcoming IDL 7.1 release is now available on the ITT VIS website. This agrees with what I heard about IDL’s roadmap at VISualize 2009. […]
September 17th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
Does anyone know if a routine for performing obliquely rotated empirical orthogonal functions in IDL has been written? Thank You in advance!
Ruben
September 17th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
I don’t know. That would be a good question for comp.lang.idl-pvwave, though.
November 18th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
Since IDL 8.0 is planned for mid 2010, will version 7.2 be skipped? Are there any specifics on 8.0 available?
November 18th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
My understanding is that the IDL 7.2 and 8.0 features listed in the roadmap above will be combined into the 8.0 released mid-2010.