Something unusual for OpenVSP — a new version with no new features, no bug fixes, and hopefully no changes in behavior. So why bother?

I was working on presentations for the OpenVSP Workshop and I felt that some things were slower than I’d like them to be. So, I decided to do some profiling. I found that things were generally pretty reasonable, but there was lots of memory churn. This is often where I get to — because previously I didn’t have a good strategy for improving these kinds of cases.

So, I decided to point my friend Claude at the reports (don’t do this unless you want to burn through a ton of tokens – ask me for more efficient ways if you go down this road.). Claude had some strategies to try — while certainly uglier code, they look to be maintainable and reasonable enough (the added complexity isn’t too great).

After that initial success, I pointed it at a few other things and found a few more wins. Among these was a change to how HumanGeom is done that at least means that the vsp executable got a lot smaller and should take up less memory. I also sent after some compiler warnings in dependencies that have really been annoying me.

In this work, I wasn’t targeting one-and-done things (eg analysis). Instead, I was mostly targeting frequently recurring tasks (things that happen when you move a slider). So the improvement should come for real interactive geometry manipulation.

So, if this was successful, everything should work the same — only faster.

I could really use your help. Please pull this version down and try it out. If you find anything that behaves differently (other than speed) from 3.51.0, please report that to me. If you have success with this version (faster, but no breaks), please report that too.

Features:

• AI assisted, profile guided optimization in several areas.
• Refactor HumanGeom math to store less data and do less math.

Build System:

• Update Code-Eli with lots of changes
• Update Pinocchio with compiler warning cleanups
• Suppress some compiler warnings for sixseries
• Clean up some warnings in Cartesian
• Remove pathlib dependency in Python dev environment
• Point CMake on Windows with old Python at python.exe instead of python3.exe