1. It was written in Java. We do not have any java devs nor any interest in learning that language. Nobody else has stepped up, period. Most of us develop from professional experience and Java simply isn't part of that.
2. The autorouter was never embedded in KiCad due to being java. It was a command line utility. It's behavior and/or bugs varied as a result.
3. ***The absolute biggest issue.*** The autorouter has broken licensing status. The author of it was sued by his company for writing it on company time/knowledge/NDA and they claimed ownership of it. We cannot legally bundle it because it's copyright status is essentially disputed by a legal entity with piles of money. That author also disappeared when he got sued. Somebody attempted to fork it but they also gave up years ago because autorouters are.....
4. Autorouters are a beast of work and a full time job in of themselves to ensure they work. You can create simple solvers but they quickly break down once you add more and more traces and constraints. There are even companies that offer autorouting services now as an example of just how much work is involved in doing it right.
We decided our time is best spent elsewhere. We wouldn't stop someone if they came up and developed a new autorouter from scratch to contribute, but nobody has and we have limited man power. We are a niche group. We are Electrical Engineering backgrounded using our intense experience and industry connections to write a tool for ourselves and others. This is well beyond the interests of comp sci code monkeys to get manpower as easily as leftpad on github ;)
1. It was written in Java. We do not have any java devs nor any interest in learning that language. Nobody else has stepped up, period. Most of us develop from professional experience and Java simply isn't part of that.
2. The autorouter was never embedded in KiCad due to being java. It was a command line utility. It's behavior and/or bugs varied as a result.
3. ***The absolute biggest issue.*** The autorouter has broken licensing status. The author of it was sued by his company for writing it on company time/knowledge/NDA and they claimed ownership of it. We cannot legally bundle it because it's copyright status is essentially disputed by a legal entity with piles of money. That author also disappeared when he got sued. Somebody attempted to fork it but they also gave up years ago because autorouters are.....
4. Autorouters are a beast of work and a full time job in of themselves to ensure they work. You can create simple solvers but they quickly break down once you add more and more traces and constraints. There are even companies that offer autorouting services now as an example of just how much work is involved in doing it right.
We decided our time is best spent elsewhere. We wouldn't stop someone if they came up and developed a new autorouter from scratch to contribute, but nobody has and we have limited man power. We are a niche group. We are Electrical Engineering backgrounded using our intense experience and industry connections to write a tool for ourselves and others. This is well beyond the interests of comp sci code monkeys to get manpower as easily as leftpad on github ;)