Re: [ng-spice] spice3f5 benchmark


To ng-spice@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it
From Paolo Nenzi <pnenzi@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it>
Date Thu, 23 Mar 2000 12:47:45 +0100 (CET)
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On Wed, 22 Mar 2000, GLAO S. Dezai wrote:

> My opinion is that the worst part of the spice3 code is the front-end. 
Yes, it is buggy, the numerical part is only messy. Quarles did a grat
job, but he had to fight with non-ansi C. There are kludges in the GENxxx
structures (I love them) and a good number of goto are used. The structure
is not very good, but it may be very efficient, do not know. 

> The front-end has been coded with a more free style. 
> Pointer are allocated and not freed. Strings are copied 
> every where etc...
Sometimes, pointers are not checked against NULL, and that's bad!

> I am not an expert of the software policies questions(GPL LGPL,...) 
> but a good question is:
> Should we spend our time to track and fix the enormous amount of 
> memory leaks in fte, cp and misc and other ugly things or completly
> rewrite these modules ? I think that is the way followed by the new
> simulator project. 

Well, if people contribute patches that derive from their work, ala
Michael, we can maintain two trees, ng-spice-rework because is the only
simulator we have now and and a yet-unnamed-simulator. The former will be
only fixed when patches are contributed (I think tha the ng-spice team
can act as integrator of patches from various sources), the latter will be
the active development tree.

  
> I think that professional designers like Reid should
> help to build or complete the new simulator design chart. All the
> specifications needed for a good and modern simulator.

I was writing a sort of cook-list for the new simulator, but now I ar
running short of spare time so I cannotmcontinue with it. If you want to
coordinate this effort, let me know (or if anyone want).

Paolo 


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