Re: [Goptical] Configure Error on Install

[Dibyendu Majumdar]

On Wed, 10 Jun 2020 at 23:18, Frederick Sonnichsen <fsonnichsen@whoi.edu> wrote:
>
> OK and thanks for the updates.
> It is very difficult to obtain a simple geometrical optics package at a
> reasonable cost. I only need to use it to visualize  occasional setups
> on my bench and there is little out there for under $500 or even $1000.
> I had a license for Zemax at one time. It cost over $7000 and did not do
> physical optics. After that I had to write a lot of my own code in ZPL
> because it was a very limited package without features such as energy
> density plots etc.
> fritz
>

One of the issues with GNU Optical is that the user guide is not
comprehensive enough, and it is a bit difficult to work out how to use
all the available features. So I have created a simple interface that
takes in text file containing lens specifications and generates
output. I am still refining this but please have a look at the input
and outputs here:

https://github.com/dibyendumajumdar/goptical/tree/master/data

Commercial packages are really expensive.

There is a free optical design package called KDP that only works on
Windows, and has a clunky UI that sometimes crashes.
http://ecalculations.com/
I have tried using it but I do not quite understand how to use it
correctly. The software is written in very unreadable and
unmaintainable Fortran. Some brave folks are trying to modernize the
code:
https://github.com/dinosauria123/Koko

Another project that I recently became aware of is a package written
in C by Don Wells from NRAO.
I have a version of this here:
https://github.com/dibyendumajumdar/ray

Final one worth mentioning is another C++ project similar to GNU optical:
https://github.com/edeforas/Astree

Regards
Dibyendu