Re: GNUstep for Engineers

[Markus Hitter]

Am 11.03.2007 um 19:20 schrieb Stefan Bidigaray:

> Anyway, the idea I had was to transfer this program into ObjC and  
> turn it
> into a library; [...] The project itself is still in the very early  
> planning stages at this point,

Looking at all those FEA frameworks available already, I don't know  
wether it is a good idea to start yet another one almost from  
scratch. Big part of the usefulness of FEA code is it's proven  
reliability and projects like CalculiX, code_aster, OpenCFD, Gerris,  
Elmer, ... are more advanced regarding this. Have a look at  
www.caelinux.com and it's forum for a more complete list.

Second important point with FEA software is it's capability to import  
geometry from standard formats like IGES or STEP and to calculate  
meshes on this geometry. Salome, using OpenCascade, is pretty good at  
this and if it's a measure, it comes along with an installed size of  
no less than 600 MB. Gmsh is a lot smaller, still it has some ten  
years of development and testing behind it.


That said, I agree with the idea of using GNUstep as an engineer's  
development platform. Obj-C is easy to learn and a lot more robust  
than other popular languages like Fortran or C++. In fact, I did a  
few steps towards joining GNUstep, Etoile and the contents of  
CAELinux already, but that's a huuuge task. Dozens of code bundles to  
download, build and install in a useable manner. I started with  
Ubuntu Edgy, if that matters.


my $0.02
Markus

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Dipl. Ing. Markus Hitter
http://www.jump-ing.de/