Surfer 0.1.0 Released!

Changelog - GitLab Release - Zenodo

Today we're releasing the first numbered release of Surfer. The big news for this first numbered release is a brand new waveform library called Wellen written by Kevin Laeufer. Wellen supports both FST and VCD, and uses a clever FST-inspired data structure for storing values, which significantly reduces both initial loading times and RAM usage for large waveforms, even for VCD files. As a crude unscientific comparison, a 7.8 GB vcd file which previously took 2 minutes to load and used 5.7 GB of RAM now loads in 8 seconds and uses 1.4 GB of RAM without any waves added.

Of course, with a new library bugs and missing features may be present. If you encounter VCD or FST files that can't be loaded or render incorrectly, please let us know!

Release schedule🔗

Like many software project, we will have a fixed release schedule with a new release every six weeks. Whatever is on the main branch will get packed and released as a numbered version. Since Surfer is still in development, we will keep the project at 0.x for a while, and breaking changes will still happen.

As releases are just snapshots of the gitlab repository, it will still be advised to always use the main branch. Releases are more intended to give something to reference, especially on https://zenodo.org, and to serve as an opportunity to summarize what has changed in the past few weeks and make some announcements.