Arjen Markus (20 December 2017) On the brink of the new year I have decided it is time to try and realize an old idea: form a group of Tcl'ers with a common interest in (system) simulation. By simulation I mean both natural systems and engineering systems and possibly other sorts of systems as well. (I have bluntly stolen the title from the ACM ...)
This page is currently a place holder, but the group has been formed: Adrien Peulvast is also keen to participate. Concrete ideas are budding, as I write this, but they are far from mature ;).
If you are interested, leave your name here.
Arjen Markus (21 february 2018) FYI: I am a trifle busy until the end of this month, but I intend to pick this up again asap.
Arjen Markus (arjen) - I mainly deal with simulations of "natural" systems, using PDEs and ODEs, as well as statistical techniques. But in my spare time I am interested in a much wider category of systems.
Denny Moore (dmoore)
Adrien Peulvast (APE) - I deal with simulation of transportation systems (subway, train) for training (with the help of Tk for visual presentation), debugging and testing purpose.
Gerald Lester (GWL) - simulation for gaming.
Luc Moulinier - Complex systems simulation
Sean Woods hypnotoad - I deal with systems of systems simulations, as well as visualizing shipboard casualties in 2d and 3d. This includes tracking crew movement, fire spread, flooding, and structure damage.
RZ - I maintain a nuclear and a fossil power plant simulator. I have written most of the user interfaces in Tcl/Tk.
Things to aim for with this group:
From a more technical point of view:
APE : I propose to let interested persons to add their names above until end of January, and then we will start thinking about the next steps. It doesn't mean that other persons cannot participate, but they will on-board in on-going activities.
roadmap item | target date |
---|---|
initial list of participants | 31st January 2018 |
system simulation group start meeting | beg. February 2018 (?) |
next steps definition | end February 2018 (?) |
APE : having a common shared understanding is mandatory to discuss. Let's start with first ones - simulation and system - and a third one linking them.
APE : can be anything used to support the group discussions from Wikipedia, white-papers, wiki pages.
arjen Already quite a few years ago I added a module "simulation" to Tcllib. It covers only a very small set of simulation types, but it might serve as a beginning.
hypnotoad - I've been working an a rapid prototyping system for adapting C code into Tcl. It includes a vector library and Tcl value representation for arrays of doubles, geometrical figures like polygons, and object oriented containers for having physical items interact.
DDG Sounds interesting, but I currently use R for this type of simulations such as here in this Monte Carlo simulation paper https://www.nature.com/articles/ejcn201645 - what would be the advantages using Tcl?
arjen That is a good question, offhand I would say there is no intrinsic advantage to use either instead of the other, but I myself feel a lot more comfortable with Tcl.
lm Two little things: (1) Paul Obermeier ( po ) aside tcl3d developed a C utility library to manipulate vectors and matrices. Maybe this could help ? (2) For R, a good compromise is to work in Tcl and send commands to R. I have a working piece of code for that, but the greatest way to do so would be to use Rserve, which is a R server running as a daemon. You connect to the daemon using a client. Unfortunately, there is no client for Tcl ... The Rserve communication protocol seems complex. Maybe writing a Tcl Rclient could be a first contribution of the group ? (there are clients in C++, and maybe java)
DDG Thinking myself: one issue with R is the licensing schema. R is mostly GPL-like, TCL is mostly BSD-like, + for Tcl here. RServe-Client would be a good point, it would do something useful on it's own. @lm - which library you mean? We have a lot of matrix and array providing packages in Tcl, may be too many to decide which is the one to go with :(
arjen I would like to read the article you referred to :). Unfortunately I have no access.
DDG I send you an E-Mail.