kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[jean-pierre charras <jp.charras@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Le 30/01/2012 19:06, Dick Hollenbeck a écrit :
> Jean-Pierre and Tom,
>
>
> Wayne came to stay at our house this weekend.  He is a great guy, even classier than he
> comes across in his emails.
I believe it easily.

> During our visit we talked about many things, one of which was an idea that came in from
> Tom last year.
>
> Attached is a sketch of a class would be compiled multiple times to remove the drawing
> code from the graphical objects, isolating it into a single class.  The  advantage is that
> we can use alternative output devices (and graphical or plotting libraries), without
> constantly adding member functions.  The member functions we assume will cause problems
> linking these container objects as DLL/DSOs, in a way that we can put scripting and
> command line processors up on top of them.
>
> I sketched this out this morning, and it provides the basic idea.  We sacrifice
> polymorphism in BOARD_ITEM::Draw(), but the overhead of PAINTER::Draw() is minimal
> relative to other bottlenecks.  It will simply mean you call PAINTER::Draw() almost
> everywhere.
>
> To interpret the context of the code, we are assuming the following:
>
> 1) bottom end (data model) PCBNEW code will be linked into a DLL/DSO
>
> 2) bottom end (data model) EESCHEMA code will be linked into a DLL/DSO.
>
> 3) they will never be linked together, but might operate together under one process.
>
>
> This means we can multiply compile class PAINTER with either
>
> -DEESCHEMA or
> -DPCBNEW
>
> There is no reason to have an inheritance tree in class PAINTER, since it is multiply
> compiled, separately linked.  When and if we ever change
> graphical libraries, we REPLACE it at compile time, not runtime.
>
> Please let me know if you have any questions, and what you guys think.  Tom since this was
> originally your idea, I wanted to bounce this off you also.

I agree.
This approach has some advantages.
And graphical libraries will certainly change in the future.

> Regards,
>
> Dick
>
> BTW, I have been told that I was spending too much time on KiCad, so my contribution rate
> is throttled down now to some hours on the weekend.  Vacation time is over.  So the move
> to PCBNEW millimeters will go slower now.
>
> Also, the increased productivity of our face to face meeting really brought home how
> inefficient a mailing list is for idea exchange.  We might want to start using another
> medium for design idea exchange, maybe IRC, or whatever.  (The developer's list is
> morphing into a user support mailing list, and it is hard to hear ourselves think here
> sometimes.  Part of that is because folks have to join developers to submit a bug?)


--
Jean-Pierre CHARRAS