Re: gEDA-user: Introduction and some questions/thoughts on gEDA/gaf...

[Ales Hvezda <ahvezda@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi Magnus,

[snip]
>Hurray! Now, what warts (except non-support for the three features above) 
>where you thinking of? Would you care to spell (spit???) it out?

	Several warts:

	1. Performance.  A few people have complained at the rather pathetic 
	speed at which medium complex circuits netlist.  gnetlist has survived
	this only because machines have gotten faster.	There is a lot
	that can be done here.  (btw, we are talking about the C part.  The
	scheme part isn't the problem).

	2. Fragile code.  Even though gnetlist works reasonably well, I am
	not thrilled about changing certain pieces of it.  I do have some
	regression tests for gnetlist, but not nearly enough to allow me to
	sleep at night.

	3. Implementation details.  There are a few parts of the code that
	are questionable and I would like to fix them, but see #2. 

	4. Not nearly extensively and transparent as I would like.  Some more
	radical things (like proper backannotation) are hard without exposing
	more internals.  This needs to be done carefully.

Keep in mind, a rewrite of gnetlist is still all in my mind and dreams,
so don't get too excited. :)

[snip]
>What I would consider as an alternative strategy is to phase out guile as the
>basis for gnetlist backends (and please note, I am *only* speaking about
>gnetlist backends) and do them in C instead. What is good with the gnetlist

	Hmmm. I don't know if C is really suitable for this.  Primarily
because it is so dang low level.  I doubt many backends would have gotten
written, if the only interface was in C.  The last thing people want to
worry about is memory allocation, structures, pointers, etc...  

								-Ales