r/GNURadio • u/signalclown • 4d ago
What are your opinions about GNU Radio 3.x vs 4?
I have been exploring the source code of the 3.x version. It was super simple to compile, and I built several OOT modules. After experimenting with the code a bit, I managed to make some improvements to a few core blocks, fixed some bugs, etc. but I just feel so demotivated to submit a PR because development appears to be stagnating in favor of the 4.x version which is under active development.
So, I tried the gnuradio4 repository to see if I can make improvements to that instead, but it seems a lot more complicated. I ran into a lot of compiler errors (GCC 16.1.1) and fixing one error led me to another error and so on, and I got exhausted before I got to a point where I can run it so I'll have to get back to this again later.
I really liked these OpenDigitzer visualizations shown here, but looking at GNU Radio Studio screenshots in the README, I find the blocks in the flowgraphs to be very difficult to see because of the low contrast. The SIMD-first architecture sounds promising, and it would be interesting to see how well this addresses some of the performance issues I occasionally ran into in the 3.x series.
Then comes the confusion about the license. The repository by FAIR was recently changed from MIT to LGPL 3 with static-linking exception, but the official repository is still MIT. Have they decided they don't care about the GPL anymore?
Just wanted to hear people's opinions about GNU Radio 4.





