(08-17-2020, 11:43 AM)borges Wrote: All in all, rewriting the memory management code seems like so much of a hassle... It pretty much sums up how I feel about NASTRAN-95 as a whole: it's an outdated program; it can't run models output from modern CAD software, and even after converting unsupported elements (lossily so), it still has hard limitations on scale, run time, and output quality. It's good, in the name of science, legacy and all that, that we got it to compile and run on modern machines, but we shouldn't put any effort into trying to improve it. Well, I certainly won't.
We should keep good docs on this amazing piece of legacy software, let it inspire us when possible, but focus actual work on more modern OSS solutions like MYSTRAN.
I have to agree. Some years ago Bill converted MYSTRAN to a free program (it was a commercial program before that). However, it was put on a NASA server (and only compiled with Lahey Fortran), missing documents, etc. While I was familiar with NASTRAN-95, I still thought MYSTRAN was a better long term solution, so we have been working to upgrade everything. About a year ago, NASTRAN-95 received more attention. At that point, the question was whether effort should be put into NASTRAN-95 or MYSTRAN. I decided we should pursue parallel paths and let things fall out naturally. I talked with some developers who were serious about NASTRAN-95 and getting it "up to speed". But it fizzled out and I could not find developers interested enough in taking on this massive challenge. It seems that MYSTRAN is much more workable and that it is a better long term platform for the community. There has been sufficient interest in it to continue on (unlike NASTRAN-95, at least for now).
Harry Schaeffer created ComLab, which is based on NASTRAN-95. I have a copy, but have not used it much. But Harry has been working with NASTRAN since the early stages and is very familiar with it. I doubt there will be anyone even close to as familiar with it as him. And since he does not work much on the open source side, I don't see NASTRAN-95 going anywhere (at least currently). Here is the manual to Harry's ComLab program (he sells the program for $100). He said I can post it here.
https://www.mystran.com/other/CML.pdf