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by aleph_naught
3174 days ago
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Just before I left JPL, the SPICE team had announced a plan for a complete rewrite in C++. The SPICE team is exceptionally small (especially considereing how widely used and impactful the software has been). IIRC since the team’s inception, to the time I left, it has been about 4-5 people. Their primary goal has always been stability and correctness over speed. Recalling a conversation with Boris, they have something like 2.5 million lines of test code. So it would take some time to port over. The codebase is probably the most documented I have ever seen, every mathematical deduction is described in great detail. That being said, as someone who has integrated CSPICE into several C++ and python projects, the modernization would be a very welcome change. The current arch depends far too much on global state, and none of it is threadsafe. https://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/naif/Toolkit_evolution_R2 |
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Good to know Boris is still there! Was Chuck still heading up the team when you left?
> a plan for a complete rewrite in C++
Oh, no! That's a real shame. I'd be all for a rewrite, especially considering their insane test coverage, but that decision worries me.
> That being said, as someone who has integrated CSPICE into several C++ and python projects, the modernization would be a very welcome change.
As someone who worked mostly with CSPICE in C but also with some other non-Fortran toolkits, I agree.