questions and suggestions


To "'ng-spice-devel@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it'" <ng-spice-devel@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it>
From Jon Engelbert <jon@beigebag.com>
Date Wed, 29 Nov 2000 15:55:04 -0500
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Hi all,
I have a few questions and suggestions.

general questions & suggestions
1) Is there a way that I can get the old messages on this mailing group so 
that I can "catch up" on the discussions.
2) It might be better to split up these emails into separate topics, and 
let people go through the whole history of the discussion.  A newsgroup 
would not be bad.  Otherwise, some sort of forum would be good.

Unix questions
1) I've never done any GUI programming on Unix.  I use MFC on Windows and I 
used Apple's Mac API years ago.  Have you decided on what API/ class 
library to use on Unix?
2) On Windows, Microsoft has given the programmer access to database 
libraries (DAO and ODBC) for free.  Is there anything like this on Unix? 
 One reason I'm asking is that it would be useful to store simulation 
results in a database, and then let the back-end / graphing module grab 
only the data that it needs from the database.  For very long simulations 
with a lot of nodes, this will have the benefit of reducing the memory 
requirement for processing data.  If it's an efficient database engine, 
then there shouldn't be a noticable hit in speed.

Berkeley Spice vs. ACS.
From what I've read, there seem to be some of you pushing to stick with 
Berkeley Spice as the basis for NG-SPICE, and others pushing to adopt ACS 
as the basis.
It seems that there are some licensing issues with Berkeley Spice.  Can 
anyone explain to me exactly what these are?  Are you working on the 
assumption that these will be waived in time, or at least not be enforced?
What are the advantages and disadvantages of using ACS vs. Berkeley Spice 
as the basis?

GUI interfaces.
I'd recommend C++ for all development on this project.   Here are my 
reasons.
Nearly every programmer is already comfortable with it.
There are very good development tools (compilers, debuggers, development 
environments) available for it on every platform.
The spice core is already in C, C++ with ACS.  The fewer languages that we 
need to be proficient with the better.
There are good class libraries available for graphing in C++.  We might be 
able to find a good public domain class library with interactive plotting, 
3-d plots, etc.

-Jon Engelbert

-----Original Message-----
From:   Paolo Nenzi [SMTP:pnenzi@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it]
Sent:   Tuesday, November 21, 2000 3:19 PM
To:     ng-spice-devel@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it
Subject:        [ng-spice-devel] CVS Commit

Hi all,

another commit, to clean up the new model (I removed a printf I inserted
to debug the code).

I have added the tests for bsim3soipd.

I am proud to say that ngspice passes them all!

Paolo


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