As with all nontrivial software projects these days, Horizon EDA is built on top a multitude of libraries and APIs. This post reflects on my experiences I’ve had interacting with them.

Excellent

SQLite

Despite having “Lite” in its name, I’ve never been let down by SQLite in terms of SQL features. Especially the support for recursive common table expression has proven invaluable for resolving dependencies among pool items. Its C API is straightforward to use without any bad surprises.

Curl

Same as SQLite, curl falls into the “no one ever got fired for using it” category, so when the need came to do HTTP requests, I went with it and wrote a simple C++ wrapper. Curl’s easy mode API actually lives up to its name and doesn’t add any unexpected complexity.

ZeroMQ

ZeroMQ is used in Horizon EDA for inter-process communication between the pool/project manager and the interactive manipulator (board, schmematic, etc. editor). Compared to TCP sockets, it’s got the advantage of handling framing (start and end of messages) and messaging patterns such as request/response. Apart from the odd bug where port number formatting depended on the locale (that got promptly fixed) I have nothing negative to say about ZeroMQ as well and highly recommend it as an easy-to-use alternative to TCP sockets if both sides are to be implemented.

JSON for Modern C++

This library is used throughout Horizon EDA for reading and writing JSON and it works so well that I almost forgot mentioning it here. If you need to interact with JSON in C++, look no further!

Clipper

Without Clipper, Horizon EDA wouldn’t have DRC, filled planes and 3D preview as it provides boolean and grow/shrink operations on polygons. I’ve had zero issues with it in terms of quality of the algorithms and its API is free from bad surprises.

KiCad Router

Despite not being a library (or not intended as such) it’s worth mentioning the KiCad router in this post, since without it, Horizon EDA wouldn’t be what it is today. Getting it to compile outside of KiCad was surprisingly easy, so the last slide of the FOSDEM talk on the router held its promise! There were some impedance mismatches down the road such the representation of pads, but overall the effort it took to integrate the router paid off very well.

Good

libgit2

For the “Remote” tab in the pool manager, I needed a way to do git operations from C++. I quickly ruled out shelling out the git command-line tool as that’d require parsing its sometimes-changing output and spawning a new process for each operation can be slow. Since the canonical library for building git-enabled applications is libgit2, I set out to implement the desired features using, only to discover that libgit2 mostly consists of the so-called low-level plumbing commands, so creating a commit is multi-step process that didn’t make much sense until I understood git’s inner workings. On the upside, I now know a lot more about git than before. If it had and easy mode like curl, it’d have made it into the Excellent category.

Gtkmm/Glibmm/Giomm (C++ bindings to the GNOME platform)

All in all, Gtkmm and the like do a really good job at mapping GNOME’s GObject-based APIs to C++ in a way that works well with modern C++ concepts. Glib itself also made running Horizon EDA on Windows much easier as it provides a reasonable abstraction for OS-specific APIs such as file operations and process management.

Gtk

Due to it’s central role as the UI toolkit, Gtk deserves its own section. As with any UI toolkit, the application is married to or held hostage by it as it’s very costly in terms of knowledge and time to switch to another one. After having worked with Gtk for many years, using it has become almost second nature since over time my mental model of how UIs are made aligned with Gtk’s. Alluding to the hostage metaphor, this could be described as Stockholm syndrome as I grew accustomed to some of Gtk’s oddities.

Going back to technicalities, here’s what I like about Gtk/Gtkmm (take this with a grain of salt due to Stockholm Syndrome):

  • Straightforward API
  • Separation of UI design from code with Glade
  • Modern UI patterns that don’t look like Windows 95 with a different shade of grey
  • Opentype features support
  • Support for modern input devices such as touchscreens and pixel-level scrolling

Even though my significant investment in Gtk and the surrounding libraries, there are couple of things in Gtk I’m not happy about:

  • Several issues surrounding GtkGLArea
    • Occasional corruption of window contents on X11
    • Odd bugs such as the GtkGLArea updating a frame too late on Windows with Intel drivers
    • Some AMD GPUs appear not to work at all on Windows, though this might be due to buggy drivers
  • UI elements such as buttons could be a bit smaller to allow for higher content density
  • Glade doesn’t see much love, there only appears to be one active developer
  • Typing in the filechooser triggers search rather than prefix matching
  • Windows being dimmed if unfocused. While this may fit in well with the GNOME desktop, it’s especially jarring with tiling window managers.
  • Gtk 4 dropping GtkMenu without an adequate replacement

Nevertheless, I still recommend Gtk as a great library to develop applications for the Linux desktop and with some limitations as a cross-platform application toolkit.

OpenGL

OpenGL sits in a similar spot as Gtk since it’s unlikely that Horizon EDA will ever move away from it. After having moved past the initial boilerplate for setting up shaders and buffers it’s API is fairly easy to use for 2D and simple 3D rendering. There might be other nicer APIs, but since my understanding of 3D graphics got shaped by OpenGL, it’s my local optimum for now.

Ugly

Open CASCADE

When it comes, to importing and exporting 3D models in the STEP format, Open CASCADE is the only viable open source option out there. Since the library isn’t exactly easy to use, all of the Open CASCADE-related code in Horizon EDA is based on the corresponding code in KiCad. Looking closer the KiCad it reveals that all(?) of it was written by one guy, so there doesn’t seem a lot of knowledge about Open CASCADE out there.