2 months between commits seems fine for a hobby project. I wouldn't call it dead for a couple of years.

Two months without a commit could still be quite active and useful software, especially for a personal project. Where would you draw the line?

Yes, I don’t question the usefulness of the project by any means. To be frank, I’m personally very interested in it—I studied celestial mechanics at university many years ago and am still curious about simulations.

The graph on the chart I shared suggests that the peak of contributions was a couple of years ago, with occasional changes since then. This doesn’t make much sense to me, as the rendering quality looks great (at least in the videos—I’ll try the software a bit later), and it’s head and shoulders above what the scientific community is currently using.

I don't think that it's fair to compare the rendering to what is currently in use in the scientific community, for two main reasons:

The first is that different types of rendering have different uses; typically in scientific visualization this is broken down into essentially "viz for self, viz for peers, viz for others" and oftentimes the most well-used rendering engines are targeted squarely at the first and second categories. The visual language in those categories is qualitatively different than that used for more "outward facing" renderings.

The second reason is that I disagree with your assertion about the quality of the visualization techniques in use within science. There are some truly spectacular visualization engines for cosmology and galaxy formation -- just to pick two examples off the top of my head, the work done by Ralf Kaehler or that by Dylan Nelson. (There are many really good examples, however, and I feel guilty not mentioning more.)

As I said in another, rather terse and unelaborated comment, though, this is really, really impressive work. I think it's important that in praising it, however, we don't discount the work that's been done elsewhere. This need not be zero-sum.

I don’t mean to discount any other work. I have already disclaimed that I don’t work in academia and rely on second-hand feedback from my classmates (in Europe)—for example, the Fortran implementation of Yoshida’s method from N years ago that nobody could modify, or the pressure for publication. Building (or learning) a new rendering engine would be a losing strategy in an academic career, as it is a much more difficult path to getting published. There are far fewer postdoc positions than PhD positions, and rendering skills won’t help in this competition.

Regarding the work of Ralf Kaehler: I have seen his renderings and looked through his articles, but to the best of my knowledge, no source code is publicly available. I don’t consider it fair to count it as something actively used in the field, beyond his lab and affiliated projects.

Disclaimer: that doesn't mean that there are no others, but their availability to researchers is limited to be widely spread.

You can't imagine that someone working on something like this would slow down as the work neared completion? Why must a piece of software / code constantly be changing? What's your specific concern? You're making a very strong claim that the "project has stalled" without any real evidence. Furthermore, the project "stalling" makes it less... what, exactly?

Yes, I can imagine multiple reasons why an author might decide to change their pace for whatever reason. my observation was that it changed.

Based on my experience (both personal and from colleagues), when a project is not in active development, the team starts losing knowledge of the codebase along with its context. For example, something that was at your fingertips while actively working on the project would be much more difficult to recall after a year. The difficulty of maintaining or extending the project grows over time if it is not actively worked on.

‘Stalled’ = contributions become less and less frequent.

If a project has stalled, there isn’t much new happening. For a simulation like this, the sky is the limit—you can make it as accurate as possible (e.g., accounting for light pressure - esp. significant around blackhole acceleration disk, the Yarkovsky effect, etc.)

update: based on author's activity on youtube, he still works on it https://www.youtube.com/@pavelsevecek/videos?view=0&sort=dd&...

I dunno, I have active hobby projects that go weeks to months without commits. Sometimes you need to experiment with things for a while to get a feel for whether or not it should be committed. Sometimes you need to take a break.

The bullshit amounts of churn-for-the-sake-of-it in the JavaScript ecosystem aren't normal.

It depends on the complexity of the project. I assumed something nontrivial, like this project. I outlined some thoughts on the effects of consistent development and what the project might become in a comment above (current state vs. becoming a go-to visualization tool in the field for years to come).

Regarding the JavaScript ecosystem—I never mentioned it. Replacing one tool with another has nothing to do with the evolution of a single project.

> hobby projects that go weeks to months without commits

Just months? :D Last week, a hobby project took down various unrelated services on my server (like receiving email) by causing disk space to suddenly fill up. The root cause is bad handling of an expired third-party domain. I had last touched that in 2012!

Or the grocery list software I use daily: its main activity period is probably 2015 through 2018, with features/bugfixes being added maybe once every 2-3 years nowadays. Back in September that I added a small feature we now use on most grocery trips, but since it gets daily use by the developer, it's not like it's unsupported

One of my few projects that has regular users besides family is a ~2013 rewrite of a 2011 file uploader. Sometimes there is over a year between any change at all, but whenever someone came along with a bug report I think the fix was never more than a few days away. Come to think of it, it was just today that a friend reported being happy that I still provide it

Although stalled perhaps isn't inaccurate, I would feel that it gives the wrong vibe if someone used that to described these daily-used projects where the bug reporting method pops a silent notification on my phone and I'm acting upon any. No offense to u/apetrov, I get what they meant when reading their subsequent replies elsewhere in the subthread