> Everyone who wants to change languages isn't familiar with the gEDA > code base. There are over 750K lines of code that work and that are > understood by at least one developer. Now, I've been using these tools for = > 2=20 > or 3 years. I'm fluent in c and c++ and I've looked at some of the code=20 > (Specifically, in PCB and gschem). Just because I've looked at some of the= > =20 > code doesn't mean I know squat about how it works (I don't...).=20
I was going to join the others on this thread in flaming Java, but decided that it was pointless to do so. However, Marvin's comment was particularly intelligent, so I thought that I could use it to add my own riff to this discussion. Yes, everybody has their own favorite language. However, it's totally unlikely that any of the gEDA Suite will be re-written anytime soon. It has a lot of inertia behind it. Moreover, I'd say that anybody who wants to start a new open-source EDA pacakge at this point is more than a little daft. It's always best to take what already exists and add to it and improve it. (As long as the starting code base is of sufficient quality, which gEDA is.) One thing we do need, however, is more transparency into how the code works. Personally, I have posted a .pdf drawing of (some of) the data structures used by libgeda & how they work at my website here: http://www.brorson.com/gEDA/gEDA_Structures_20050108.pdf My little utility, gattrib, which is part of gEDA/gaf includes a bunch of (hopefully) high-level documentation in its source tree. Finally, I have also started (but not finished or distributed) an OOO doc describing the calling args and returns from many (and someday all) of the fcns in libgeda. My point is this: If there are others out there who share my view, I'd be happy to post my libgeda doc and let others investigate the libgeda, gschem, gnetlist, etc. code and add to the doc. I think it would help enlarge the developement community if we had a better set of docs describing how the code works. In the end, I think more transparency into the existing code base would be much more useful than writing or re-writing anything in the latest hype-language. Let me know if you want to share the work of documenting libgeda! Stuart
