Broken mopac-win
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There is a Windows-only windowed version of MOPAC, mopac-win
, that opens a window displaying a summary of a MOPAC calculation in progress and allows calculations to be paused. This functionality was implemented with Intel's QuickWin library, and does not allow for an I/O channel to be shared between the QuickWin main application and a dynamically linked library. Since MOPAC is presently compiled as a DLL, it is not able to display its output in the window as intended. Presently, mopac-win
is omitted from the Windows distribution of MOPAC.
There are two possible solutions to this problem. A simple, inelegant solution would be to statically compile the core MOPAC library into the mopac-win
executable, which will roughly double the size of the MOPAC Windows installer. A more complicated solution, which might allow MOPAC to be integrated into more GUIs in a more flexible way, would be to set up a simple callback interface that shares output strings explicitly rather than through an I/O channel.
Unless there is appreciable interest in mopac-win
, this issue has a very low priority.
After a year of absolutely no interest in this broken MOPAC feature, I have decided to completely remove it from the project. A long-term goal of the open-source MOPAC project is to remove or replace all OS-specific functionality, which includes (1) this feature, (2) the mopac-bz
program, and (3) the DOS command shell scripts for building MOPAC's reference data webpages.
The only functionality of this window-based MOPAC feature was to allow users to view an output file of a calculation in progress and pause the calculation. This functionality can be achieved more simply in any Linux-like shell by running tail -f
on the output file and kill -STOP
on the MOPAC process. As such, there isn't a good reason to implement this functionality in MOPAC-specific software, hence its removal.