[Swftools-common] Re: swfc crash

[Jean Thierry-Mieg]

Hello Chris and SWF-developpers
Sorry my previous answer was probably a bit obscure
The following is an attempt to clarify the way I am using SWF

I am a physicist turned biologist interested in human and other genes 

What I am trying to do is to generate a very large number of diagrams in flash
to represent the molecular structure of the genes, in this case a gene from a 
little
plant called Arabidopsis thaliana

Every day i serve about 10.000 images of this kind to the biology and medical 
community

The data are stored in an open source object oriented database that I wrote 
many years ago
called Acedb, and the whole system including the data curation is called AceView
the whole source code is available from my ftp site accessible from the web page
and has been used by many research groups involved in the genome project

From the elementary genes, ATGC sequences and chromosome coordinates, the 
AceView database 
server generates a diagram as meta graphic .acedb primitives, which look very 
much like a .sc file
Then we have drivers that transform this meta image into various actual images
like X11, Postscript, gif, png (plus many now obsolete drivers as for example 
the old MAC-OS)

For a long time, I was generating .gif images for the web, but thanks to SWF, i 
now generate flash
images which are way superior, because they are vectorized
To construct the driver, I wrote a very simple sugar-syntax converter from 
.acedb-graphics to .sc
Then I added in swfc.c the table of colors used by .acedb
Finally the database server uses a pipe-call to invoke the swfc compiler and 
transform the .sc buffer into a .swf buffer
and exports  the .swf bufffer via the Apache front end to the web browsers as 
.swf embeded in a java script enabled .html page

Using SWF rather than gif is a great improvement, and I am very thankful to the 
SWF team

Today, my server is a suse linux 64-bit, but the code also works on any other 
kind of unix machine
Currently, i still use in production the old 32bit swf release 8, so I have to 
link-in a dedicated 32-bit library
which will soon be obsolete (hardware is evolving too fast)
So now I wish I could replace swfc-8 with the newer 64-bits swf release 9
and the difficulty I have is that the swf parser.lex/yacc has a bug that I am 
unable to discover

Again, the problem occurs before swfc starts creating the .swf file, since we 
crash on the first call to
the tokenizer

I would be happy to give any detail that you may find useful

jean




On Oct 20, 2010, at 10:39 PM, Chris wrote:

>> On Wed, 20 Oct 2010 21:43:39 -0400
>> Jean Thierry-Mieg <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
>> yesterday I downloaded the latest stable distribution 
>> swftools-0.9.1
>> 
>> it compiled neatly on a linux  x86_64 box
>> although i noticed a few cast problem relative to 64 bits that i ll report 
>> later
>> 
>> the problem is that for some .sc files, the compiler crashes
>> I attach an example
>> the file swfc_crash.complete.tc
> 
> Maybe I'm missing the obvious here, but the neither of the files you attached
> make logical ( as in swfc ) sense.  May one ( as in someone who doesn't feel
> like trawling through a minimum of 2500 lines of code! ), ask exactly what it
> was you were trying to do here?
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> 
> Chris <address@hidden>