kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Lorenzo Marcantonio <l.marcantonio@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Apr 25, 2014 at 03:18:51PM -0500, inkblotter wrote:
> algorithms; imagine a graph of all the nets and pads; sort of a live
> netlist, with built in search and visiting algorithms. If I wasn't already

The 'live' thing could be a big problem; the current pcbnew works well
because there is almost no redundancy in the data structures. Keeping
a connection graph would be somewhat tricky, especially considering that
the undo architecture is copy based, not transactional (command based).

AFAIK currently 'index' data structure are built from scratch just
before something big like the track cleanup. Maybe there is some support
structure for the ratnests too (updated with the rebuild, probably...
when the nest goes crazy a rebuild fixes it). I actually never worked on
these innards.

However just only something like an rtree could really help some
operations (the CERN people were working on something like that).

Luckily modern PCs are sufficiently fast to work with the simple linear
search used everywhere (until the board is, maybe, 5000 pad big, more or
less). And, of course, even if DRC is slow, who cares :D

-- 
Lorenzo Marcantonio
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