solvespace VS digikey-kicad-library

We use rebase on solvespace, along with sensible squashing so most commits along master are pretty self contained. You can see the clean history here:

https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/commits/master/

I changed a behavior to the "more standard" one because it felt obviously right. This was a 3 line change. But the was enough backlash right there in the pull request. So I spent a couple hours remembering how to add a configuration option to keep the old way for those guys:

https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/pull/1425

> If you like Linkage, you might also like Solvespace.

No, I mean Brent Curry's Linkage[1] bicycle design software, not David Rector's Linkage Mechanism Designer and Simulator[2].

You should read Wikipedia article.[0]

N.B. About SolveSpace, as I'm its experienced user[youtube,patreon], I may say next: yes, it could be used for bike mockup, as any other CAD, but it still has a lot of limitations and even does not export correct STEP files yet[3], and in FreeCAD such STEP could fixed only partially.[video]

So, for serious 3D CAD work I highly recommend use FreeCAD (and LibreCAD for 2D CAD work) instead of SolveSpace, and use SolveSpace only as a helper tool like a calc or as a notepad for noting ideas.

About Linkage Mechanism Designer and Simulator, it is only useful for planar (2D) kinematics analyze, and if You are looking an alternative for it take a look on Pyslvs[4], that is in part based on SolveSpace's solver.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/rattleCAD#History

[1] https://bikechecker.com/

[2] https://blog.rectorsquid.com/linkage-mechanism-designer-and-...

[3] https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/issues/206

[4] https://github.com/KmolYuan/Pyslvs-UI

[video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3LJMeqUDrU

[youtube] https://www.youtube.com/@appsoft

[patreon] https://patreon.com/app4soft

C++ this file covers all the math for working with NURBS curves and surfaces:

https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/blob/master/src/srf...

There is a lot more in other files - triangulation, booleans, creation - but the core math functions are there in very readable form.

>> Maybe somebody has statistical survey of how much of the existing deployed CPU core count is typically used?

My guess is very few cores are used on average. I did some testing with Solvespace to see which build options contributed most to performance:

https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/issues/972

Obviously using OpenMP for multi-core was the big win. But what's not shown is that in typical usage (not the test I ran) if you're dragging some geometry around it will use all cores (in my case 4 cores / 8 threads) at about 50 percent utilization. That percentage probably drops as more cores are thrown at it due to Amdahl's Law. In other words, throwing double the cores at it will give a good boost to a lot of code that is already taking less than half the time (wall clock time, not CPU time).

We added OpenMP to a number of functions for significant performance gains. And in fact, any remining single-thread operation that gets the parallel treatment is likely to have a significant impact on overall performance since that is where most of the time is spent now. At this point we're more focused on features and bugs.

Algorithmic improvements are possible and I'd like to do those in the future, but they are much harder to do than sprinkling some #pragmas around critical loops. That will improve the scalability though, where multithreading really did not.

Yeah why should we even care about s390 for some things?

https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/issues/1264

I don't think big commercial customers are designing airplanes with it.

Digikey has a pretty decent library Its not constantly update but there is lots to pull from

I'm a little confused by your post. It's your job as the designer to ensure the footprints are correct. If you want an atomic library try the digi key one. Each symbol has one footprint so it's hard to mess up. https://github.com/Digi-Key/digikey-kicad-library

Software quality and component library quality are a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, Kicad's editors are popular enough and good enough that major vendors (like Digikey [1] and SnapEDA [2]) are offering Kicad footprints for products.

[1]: https://github.com/Digi-Key/digikey-kicad-library