Ludwig Jaffe wrote on: Mon, 21 Jan 2019 21:11:41 +0100
Hi good point regarding the size of a PCB.
If instead of a single window you can see the PCB at different scales at the same time then it would be practical to do very large PCBs. You could see the start and end points for a line going all the way across with two windows while seeing the whole board in a third. I don't think KiCAD does this and don't know how hard it would be to add (but I guess it shouldn't be too hard).
One other thing that IC tools normally allow and which PCB tools don't have is to switch between "black box" and full representations of subcircuits. So you might start out with only four rectangles labeled core0 to core3 and then click on core1 to see it divided into rectangles labaled icache, dcache, control and datapath. Then you can click on datapath to see it replaced by even smaller rectangles labeled ALU, registers and so on. It can be hard to design an IC if you are forced to see all the transistors all the time (and the tool will run very slowly and use up a lot of memory).
If you are fit with electric I would also support developing the c code as I know some c and fast ferforming tools are written in c. First thing to do is get latest c source and make a doxyfile with dot enabled to generate caller and called graphs and some HTML to surf and understand the code.
We should give electric a try provided we code c.
I am still looking at the various options, which was why I was asking about Electric instead of actually recommending it. For now I tend to prefer Magic (which seems to be used as a GDS file viewer in this project).
I do have a lot of experience with C but prefer to program in Smalltalk when possible.
-- Jecel