[Ktechlab-devel] The biggest technical issue

[Alan Grimes]

first off, I hate C++. Normally you'd think that all you have to do is 
to remember to delete what you allocate, noooo, you not only have to 
remember to delete your stuff but you also need to keep track of HOW you 
allocated it. There's a bug in my Qmatrix class, and possibly Qvector 
too where I just deleted the darn arrays, I think I was supposed to 
delete[] them.... Huge difference -- in C++. =(

That much is trivial.

The biggest issue is that everyone wants more parts yet the approach 
Ktechlab currently uses to implement parts is not scalable. =( If you 
want to see what I mean by this, use kdevelop's "class inheritance 
diagram" feature to look at the "picinfo" tree. That one class has 
roughly fifty children and it's descendants are nested as much as 7 
levels deep!

Right now the approach is that whenever anyone wants anything 
implemented, what happens is that several classes are developed and 
added to the package. This creates a maintainance nightmare. =\

The solution I proposed was to move to a database driven parts library, 
where parts are loaded at runtime from a library of XML files which can 
be added and tweaked by the user without having to recompile the entire 
program.

The problem is that implementing this functionality will require a great 
deal of work. For one thing, the simulation model of each component 
would have to be compiled from code embedded in the XML file.


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