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Comment by gobdovan | Hacker News Reader

As an amateur in the space: I download on Mac, run `ngspice`, "Error: Can't open display: :0". I look in the code - hardcoded X11-era assumptions. Not exactly modern affordances...

Then I try to understand and extract the actual formulas, and there isn't a clean formula layer anywhere. All is procedural, e.g. in `b4v6temp.c` formulas are tangled with branching, caching, model-state mutation. Extracting the computation, embedding cleanly and exposing through a sane API feels hair-pulling.

So yeah, maintained, but not as in 'modern, embeddable, understandable software component' I'd be looking forward in a rewrite. Maybe not even touch the simulation core, just rewriting Embedding/API layer and the UX would already be a big deal.

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This explains a lot. But you merely need to look into the family of spice forks to realise, given the way that they're strangely limited to certain operating systems and embedded inside certain proprietary IDEs, that's there's something very wrong with the code architecture.

So, that would be an awesome project!

> As an amateur in the space

Why are you not using this through KiCad? That's what I would expect an amateur to do; especially since they handle the UX that you are complaining about.

And you are complaining about tangled code but that code is almost certainly hyper-optimized since performance actually mattered a LOT to people running spice simulations. ng-spice (and Spice3 and Spice2) were not written for programming ease; they were written to get a real job worth real money done.

In addition, any change you make to that code needs to be run back through numerical regression tests to make sure you didn't break things since this is software that people expect to get correct answers.

However, if the legacy seems to bother you so much, perhaps you should look at Xyce from Sandia?

> And you are complaining about tangled code but that code is almost certainly hyper-optimized since performance actually mattered a LOT to people running spice simulations.

I can 100% guarantee you, that these are never mutually exclusive at all.

> Why are you not using this through KiCad? That's what I would expect an amateur to do; especially since they handle the UX that you are complaining about.

They sound like an amateur at circuit design, not software engineering (which is how I'd describe myself too).

KiCad is still the preferred interface.

The original point stands. Ngspice shows its heritage from the days of Fortran far more than a modern code base would or should. It's sole great virtue (from my point of view) is that it integrates with KiCad and only falls over with no reason about 5% of the time.

I would suspect that some of the simulation systems coming out of the Julia community or Xyce would be a better base.

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