[karotte]

I only got to know about LibrePCB at the end of 2016 after several months of development on Horizon EDA. While there are some similarities such as the use of UUIDs and strong link between schematic and netlist, there are major architectural differences such as Horizon EDA using raw OpenGL vs QTSceneGraph(?) and Gtkmm vs QT.

As far as I can tell, the development models also differ significantly: The LibrePCB devs seem to be focused on doing things the right way the first time such as having a proper operation-based undo/redo stack whereas horizon just stores a copy of the whole schematic/board for undo/redo. They also seem to focus more on simplicity for beginners rather than more advanced features such as length tuning and advanced design rules.

Putting development effort where I like enabled me do to the board for my master thesis https://github.com/carrotIndustries/x-band-tx/ (4 Layers, differential pairs, length-matched traces) in Horizon EDA only after about 2 years after the initial beginning of development.

[rnestler]

I still remember introducing you to Urban, the main LibrePCB developer, at FOSDEM after meeting you at 33c3 (was it 33c3?) the same year. It was fun listening to the two of you talking about your design decisions, where you came up with almost identical solutions (UUIDs for library elements for example) and where you went different paths.

We also talked about ways to increase collaboration between the two tools. A few ways I could see is:

* Router: Extracting the KiCad router into a separate repository / library so it can be used and developed by the different projects.

* Gerber Compatible Stroke fonts: Would be nice to have one font specification and implementation to be used for PCBs. LibrePCB started the FontoBene (https://github.com/fontobene) project to do just this, but currently LibrePCB is the only user of it.

* Regular exchange of ideas and domain specific problems / challenges and solutions. This already happened a few times at c3 and FOSDEM.