kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[jp charras <jp.charras@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Le 17/04/2017 à 07:19, cedric.dewijs@xxxxxxxxxx a écrit :
> Hi All,
> 
> I don't have a deep understanding about the internal working of Kicad, so I have no idea what I'm
> talking about :-)
> When Kicad is started, I think the libraries are not yet accessed, until the user wants to place a
> new part in the schematic, the schematic is converted into a PCB, and other actions like that.
> Is it possible to rework the library loading part of Kicad that a library is loaded only when
> accessed? This way the startup time of Kicad is faster, so the user can start to work on his project
> sooner. This also allows for users who don't have a large amount of RAM, but do want to be able to
> access a huge amount of libraries. This of course slows down the first access to a library.
> Maybe to speed things up, Kicad can load libraries after startup, while it's otherwise idle.
> 
> Kind regards,
> cedric
> 

Eeschema loads all listed libs when starting, because it needs the graphic symbols stored in libs.

Loading all libs means also loading thousand of symbols (with many duplicate names, like cmos4000
and cmos_ieee, only different by the shape of symbols).
This can be slow (depending on your hard disk).
But also the "choose component dialog" could be significantly slower:
- slower to be built.
- slower to choose a component among thousand of symbols.

Moreover if a library is renamed or deleted, the library list becomes outdated (seen the number of
"bugs" reports for Pcbnew)

My personal opinion is to load only a minimal amount of libraries (true for both Eeschema and Pcbnew).

A few years ago, I took a training course on an other EDA tool.
The first thing the teacher said was how to configure the libraries to avoid to many components in
lists, with most of them useless (and how to configure the whole EDA tool).

-- 
Jean-Pierre CHARRAS