alt Hacker NewsErm, 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.
Replies
skeledrew • yesterday at 11:50 PM
I see "sourceforge" and immediately I think "this project is way behind time and is going to pose a lot of issues to new users, if it's still active".
➕ show 1 reply
eqvinox • yesterday at 10:32 PM
+1, a project presenting at FOSDEM certainly does not need a "revive".
➕ show 1 reply
As an amateur in the space: I download on Mac, run `ngspice`, "Error: Can't open display: :0". I look in the code - hardcoded X11-era assumptions. Not exactly modern affordances...
Then I try to understand and extract the actual formulas, and there isn't a clean formula layer anywhere. All is procedural, e.g. in `b4v6temp.c` formulas are tangled with branching, caching, model-state mutation. Extracting the computation, embedding cleanly and exposing through a sane API feels hair-pulling.
So yeah, maintained, but not as in 'modern, embeddable, understandable software component' I'd be looking forward in a rewrite. Maybe not even touch the simulation core, just rewriting Embedding/API layer and the UX would already be a big deal.