kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Tomasz Wlostowski <tomasz.wlostowski@xxxxxxx>]

On 28/11/17 18:25, Heikki Pulkkinen wrote:
> 
> Zones filling new record with new connectivity algo with A64-Olinuxino
> board. 13s.

Heikki,

I would be very glad to include your improvements in the zone filling,
but the code you've sent to me (your Github) does not meet the quality
standard we expect:
- It's a mix of object and non-object oriented code which is diffucult
to understand.
- It doesn't follow Kicad coding style rules.
- It contains much more than faster zone filling, everything is mixed
with your via stitching/thermal code that we did not accept for the
reasons we had already explained to you.

I also investigated why the zones are filled slowly - the major reason
was a bug in the GAL zone filling algorithm, which was filling all zones
by performing N independent fills of every zone causing the isolated
copper islands to be checked N times (where N=number of zones in the
design) instead of just once. The branch [1] contains this bug fixed. It
also introduces quite a speedup in zone loading/rendering and
parallelizes all zone filling operations using OpenMP. It refills all
zones on the "A64-Olinuxino
board" in less than 3 seconds and something around 10s for the "wrs"
board on a Core i7-4700MQ, 16GB RAM machine.

Please, if you want to be a member of Kicad developers, follow some rules:
- Ask before making heavy changes. Connectivity algorithm is an example
of a heavy change.
- Don't introduce large or risky changes in your first patches. Changing
the file format is an example of a potentially risky change that should
be consulted with other developers.
- Announce you're working on something before you start writing the
code. Someone else may be already working on this part - which is what
exactly happened with the connectivity algorithm

I'll be very happy to have a look at your teardrops and automatic zone
stitching code - which IMHO is an very valuable addition to Kicad -
after the V5 stable release is out.

Cheers,
Tom

[1] https://github.com/twlostow/kicad-dev/tree/tom-faster-zones