SALSA 1.17.0 Released!

[Clark Hughes]

Howdy SALSA Community,

We are excited to announce two developments regarding the SALSA project. First is the release of SALSA version 1.17.0. We've had to overcome some challenges regarding our public release processes and in fact had to skip version 1.16. Therefore, version 1.17.0 provides quite a few improvements relative to 1.15.0 which was the prior community release. The most substantial user-facing improvement is the addition of Undo/Redo functionality. We've also added a "notes" field to all record types, updated most of the underlying libraries, and addressed quite a few bugs. The release notes detail these and other changes.

The other big change is in how we provide the SALSA source code to the community. The source (and installers) have previously been hosted on ARL's web site, but we have now gone live on GitHub! The SALSA project is hosted at https://github.com/sgl-ut/SALSA and the 1.17.0 source code, release notes, and Windows installer (.msi) are all available there.

The team is also working to complete 1.18.0, and we expect to provide that and future versions to the community at a much accelerated pace. Warm regards to all,

Clark and Team

[Peter Firmstone]

I've been using 1.15, just thought I'd take 1.17 for a spin.  Is there a document that details the proj file syntax changes?

I created a new project file, then copied the records from a recent adjustment, there are no errors ! highlighted when the proj file is opened, but perhaps there's a syntax issue as I get the following error:

--- Thu Jul 31 10:40:44 2025 Generate Initial Positions ----------------------------------

10:40:44.906 lsapreprocessor starting...COMPLETED

Error - C:/Program Files/SALSA/bin/lsasolver.exe terminated unexpectedly.FAIL

--- Thu Jul 31 10:41:12 2025 -------------------------------------------------------------

Thanks, 

Peter.

[Peter Firmstone]

I ran lsasolver from the command line and got the above error.

I'm installing visual studio, will report back if that fixes it.

Regards,

Peter.

[Peter Firmstone]

Ok, just verifying, if you get this error, you need to install the C++ desktop development module and Visual Studio.

[Clark Hughes]

Hi Peter,

Thank you very much for sharing that. I've captured an issue so we can resolve this, ideally by including that dll (and any related ones) in the msi, or at a minimum to catch the error and provide a more informative and actionable error message. Our scope through version 1.19  is pretty well locked in, so I expect we'll have this in 1.20. Thank you again,

Clark

[Clark Hughes]

For the greater good,

I replied to Peter the other day but didn't realize that reply-all from gmail wouldn't make it onto this forum, so here is what I shared:

Hi Peter,

That's a disappointing error... SALSA 1.17.0 should be able to open the 1.15.0 project. You mentioned copy/pasting records over; what happens if you try to open a project that ran successfully in 1.15.0? (You might make a copy of the project first because 1.17.0 will overwrite the 1.15.0 file when it opens/updates/saves it.)

The .lsa file spec is detailed in the user manual chapter "LSA Record Reference" (or source doc/manual/UserManual/lsarecords.tex). Key changes since 1.15.0 include instrument height uncertainty and the general notes field that's now supported on all record types. Again, I think your best path would be to open the 1.15.0 project with 1.17.0; SALSA should be able to do that gracefully, and we'd be interested in having your example if it doesn't.

Hope to hear from you again. Thanks,

Clark

[Peter Firmstone]

Thanks Clark,

Great work btw.

It has no problem reading 1.15.0 files, the missing dll was the issue.

I also loaded the EGM2008 1 arcminute geoid, that works too.

I did notice the UI is too slow for large projects now, if it was possible to edit the error standard deviation via the measurement residuals window and close other windows maybe that would speed it up?  Perhaps it needs a database back end to speed up editing for large projects?   The largest project we used SALSA was 18,000 observations, this was too slow at 8,000.

Regards,

Peter.

[Clark Hughes]

Hey Peter,

Thanks for the follow-up. The performance issue on really large projects is something we've given inconsistent attention to. I appreciate your data points. I'll work with the team to see if we can benchmark 1.18 (complete but not publicly released yet) and 1.19 (in progress) against 1.17 and 1.15 so we can understand if there's work that needs to be planned for 1.20 and/or future releases. Again, thank you,

Clark

[Ian Ray]

Hi all,

Can someone provide a link to wherever the 1.17.0 MSI installer lives now?

I've searched through the GitHub page with no luck, and also tried to find on the https://www.arlut.utexas.edu/salsa/ page.
Looks like the files were moved off of the .edu storage but.... not on GitHub either?

Even checked the Wayback machine, which looks like there used to be a URL to download https://www.arlut.utexas.edu/salsa/software/SALSA-1.15.0-win64.msi , but that no longer works.

Thanks,

- Ian

[Clark Hughes]

Hi Ian,

The .msi is on the GitHub page: https://github.com/sgl-ut/SALSA

On the right side of the page you'll see Releases; click on 1.17.0

Then at the bottom of that page you'll see the .msi along with other artifacts (source archives).

Regards,

Clark