[Ktechlab-devel] The biggest technical issue

[Mauricio Giovagnini]

Alan Grimes escribió:
> 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.

I agree, Java makes a better approach for that with its 
garbage collector.  Anyway c/c++ is theorically more close 
to the hardware (not framework involved) and its executables 
should perform better.

> 
> 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.
> 

Your approach sounds pretty logical to me.  Its seems to be 
how other EDA softwares work and the user can even edit and 
customize components to fit their needs.

I can't add anything as I'm not used to the internal 
simulation characteristics of Ktechlab but is there anything 
like Spice involved?


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Mauricio Giovagnini (Maunix)
www.maunix.com.ar
Cordoba, Arg.
LinkedIn Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/mgiovagnini