How do I start writing a plugin for VisIt?
VisIt customers most commonly want to know how to write a database reader plugin. The process for writing a new database reader plugin is described in the Getting Data Into VisIt manual. Other plugin types will eventually be documented in the Plugin Developer’s Guide. Since that guide has not been completed, the best way to begin writing a new plot or operator plugin is to send e-mail describing the plugin that you plan to write to visit-users@ornl.gov. The VisIt developers will be able to tell you the general steps that are involved and also suggest where to look for code that you can copy from existing plugins. Plugins are generally meant to be written using the shared libraries and header files that are provided in the binary installations of VisIt. This means that you don’t have to build all of VisIt in order to start developing your plugin. However, this assumes that you are going to use compilers that are compatible with the ones used to build VisIt. If you use compilers that gen
