alt Hacker NewsIf this experiment ends up resulting in a real migration path, I think that would be completely awesome. Maybe it means we have a chance to revive older projects such as ngspice [0], but with modern affordances and better safety properties.
From your post, though, it sounds like Bun may have been a pretty direct rewrite, without too many hard choices along the way. Is that fair?
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bsder • yesterday at 10:19 PM
Erm, what's the problem with ngspice? There appears to be people working on it and it even recently got integrated into KiCad.
That sounds like a perfectly functional project, to me.
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I hear your suggestion without feeling the need to remark the far too common Linux/Deveoper response of “but if you just do all this other stuff and run it this special way and install 15 dependencies and compile XYZ lib from source then clearly it works fine and you’re mistaken”.
That’s exactly the type of thing that is needed is to optimize projects for modern compatibility, portability and safety when other modernization efforts or forks don’t exist.
That said, I suspect this rewrite went so quickly and so optimally because it had the benefit of (effectively) 100% test coverage already in place in a really well defined system. Most open source project spawn from efforts of a single developer who frequently never waste time writing tests for a little side project. Later as it grows, they rarely stop and go back to implement testing. So if you’re truly working with an old dead project, there is a really good chance there are zero tests to be found. That is far more difficult to reach the same completeness unless the goal is simply to port all of those same problems to a new language and hope type safety fixes them.
(Not specific to ngspice, just mean generally.)