Re: [ng-spice-devel] personal note on ACS and NG-SPICE (fwd)


To ng-spice-devel@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it
From "Arno W. Peters" <a.w.peters@ieee.org>
Date Mon, 11 Sep 2000 22:05:16 +0200
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In-Reply-To <Pine.LNX.3.96.1000911210312.2649A-100000@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it >; from pnenzi@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it on Mon, Sep 11, 2000 at 09:04:15PM +0200
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On Mon, Sep 11, 2000 at 09:04:15PM +0200, Paolo Nenzi wrote:

> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Sat, 9 Sep 2000 21:52:13 -0700
> From: Al Davis <aldavis@ieee.org>
> To: pnenzi@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it
> Subject: personal note on ACS and NG-SPICE
> 
> [...]
>
> I have the impression that the primary goal of the NG-SPICE group is
> to bring the features of the commercial Spice tools into free
> software.  In other words, to make a complete product.
> 
> I do not see a conflict here.  I see some interesting opportunities.

I am interested.

> By lurking on the NG-SPICE mail lists, and perusing the
> archives, I noticed some trends.
> 
> One is the politics of Berkeley and licensing.

Berkeley did some fine work, both for Unix and Spice.  From a historic
perspective, I see many similarities between Unix and Spice.  I hope
that the GPLed simulator can do for Spice what Linux is doing for
Unix.

> [...]
> 
> This all makes me wonder why it is so important to base it on Spice,
> especially considering that none of the group has any real
> personal attachment to it.

The Spice source base is interesting only because it supports many
more models than ACS at this moment.  Once we have extracted all that
knowledge and have it properly understood and documented, only then
should we consider putting the Spice code to rest.

> With all this in mind, I would like to offer you ACS.

This is very much appreciated.  The infrastructure (web pages, CVS,
mailing lists) put in place by Paolo will give ACS a public face and
give it more visibility than it currently has.

Take myself for example: I have known about ACS for some time.
However, I never contributed to ACS for the simple reason that I had
no way of testing the waters: reading the web site, perusing the
mailing archives, lurking on the mailing list, downloading the regular
snapshots.

Your help in getting to know the code will be of greatly appreciated.
One thing we sorely lacked was someone on the team that had a good
understanding of the code.  We managed, but we would have progressed
faster if we had a couch.

> The biggest down side I see with this is that there are some in the
> group that will not touch C++.  This seems strange to me, because I
> found C++ to be a big productivity improvement over C.  Much more
> than the improvement of C over Fortran.  But, to each his own.  If
> the system is modular enough it doesn't matter what language the
> pieces use, and C++ modules can be C inside.

I don't have much experience in C++.  C++ is a big language (much
bigger than C) with a lot more pitfalls than C.  For me, it represents
a significant learning curve.  However, I don't mind to switch over to
C++, but it will take some time to become versatile with it.


Regards,
-- 
Arno

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