Hi
Since neither the older C nor the newer Java versions of Electric are being developed, my idea was to fork the C code. That is the one that was actually used commercially for IC design and the one that I had some experience in. I have no idea if there are improvements or bug fixes in the Java version or if it is a simple rewrite. Of the many rewrites I have seen, the only one I ever saw any value in was the change in Spice from Fortran to C as the original code's memory management was just too horrible due to Fortran's limitations.
Porting it to a more modern C-dialect, maybe providing C++ interface libraries, might actually be a really neat idea. I'd be in! Lets fork it and begin updating it to modern standards! ^^
About KiCAD, it works great for the PCB sizes we use. But imagine trying to design a printed circuit of 15 meters by 20 meters. What changes would be needed in KiCAD to make this practical? This is what designing integrated circuits is like - the ratio of feature size to project size is four orders of magnitude or more.
It's a really good point. I didn't take into account that someone might wanna design a very complicated circuit, which might result in a very large IP core. Maybe we should go for electric...
Can you fork it and push it to GitHub somewhere? Maybe introduce CMake as build system?
Then we can get started.
Cheers -lev