carrying forward

[Julia Longtin]

Hi, I'm Julia Longtin.

I'm a Free Software developer who has used implicitcad in the past, and now find it very broken.

I'm running it against debian unstable.

I have found that for all but the simplest objects, MASTER eats all ram and dies.

(after pinning optparse to 0.9.1.1 or less)

8745efb0ce7656ea6a7140f97b313a9d5279f9ee works as expected, and is amazingly slow. hours and hours for a .stl from my (admitedly complicated) .escad.

I'm in the process of learning haskell, in order to fix this, and can use all the hands i can get.

I just thought it was appropriate to say "help!" before wandering into the wilderness.. learning to optimise and improve this code.

Julia Longtin

[Christopher Olah]

Hi Julia,

I'd be excited for others to take over ImplicitCAD. My energy is
completely focused on machine learning research and I don't see that
changing. I haven't thought about ImplicitCAD for a while and don't
have anything to contribute.

I think Henning Meyer (CCed) is also interested in working on this?

Chris

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[Ben Gamari]

Julia Longtin <julia....@gmail.com> writes:

> Hi, I'm Julia Longtin.
>
> I'm a Free Software developer who has used implicitcad in the past, and now
> find it very broken.
>

Sadly that may be a pretty accurate characterization. I've been
consumed by other projects and my thesis and I think others are in a
similar position so ImplicitCAD hasn't had the same attention it has
received in the past.

> I'm running it against debian unstable.
>
> I have found that for all but the simplest objects, MASTER eats all ram and
> dies.
>
> (after pinning optparse to 0.9.1.1 or less)
>
> 8745efb0ce7656ea6a7140f97b313a9d5279f9ee works as expected, and is
> amazingly slow. hours and hours for a .stl from my (admitedly complicated)
> .escad.
>

Ouch. Could you share an object demonstrating this behavior? What
resolution are you trying to render with? What GHC version are you
building with?

> I'm in the process of learning haskell, in order to fix this, and can use
> all the hands i can get.
>

Lovely, I hope you are enjoying the language as much as I do.

> I just thought it was appropriate to say "help!" before wandering into the
> wilderness.. learning to optimise and improve this code.
>

I would start by looking at the profile. While the loss of optimization
incurred by GHC's profiler can make this a bit painful from the sound of
it the issue will become apparent quite quickly.

Unfortunately you may find that the issues are deeper than just
performance. Last I knew, while the ImplicitCAD solver worked for most
cases it wasn't hard to find edge cases which resulted in very broken
(presumably due to numerical instability).

Cheers,

- Ben