Lately I have not been very active on the blog since I am encountering some difficulties in the attempt to introduce MPI parallelism. Meanwhile, I have extended support to the latest version of the DOLFIN library.
Among other changes, one that strongly affects fem-fenics is the shift from the shared pointer implementation by the Boost libraries to the one included in the Standard Template Library with the new C++11 standard. This change alone calls for edits in almost all the codebase of the package, as basically all DOLFIN data structures are stored via smart pointers in the corresponding fem-fenics classes. However, currently version 1.3.0 is still present in the official repositories of the main Linux distributions, thus switching abruptly to the latest version would have prevented further releases of the package for a while.
In order to tackle the above mentioned issue, I resorted to the preprocessor capabilities, so as to infer from the DOLFIN version available on the compiling computer the right kind of pointers to use. Among other options, the preprocessor flags obtained using pkg-config define also a macro reporting the DOLFIN version. It is, then, possible to check it and choose the correct pointer implementation right before compilation. Currently in fem-fenics every occurrence of boost::shared_ptr has been replaced by a SHARED_PTR macro, which in turn is defined in a new header that takes care of setting it to the right value. There is just a catch: preprocessor conditionals cannot compare strings, but the DOLFIN_VERSION macro is indeed defined as a string. In order for this approach to work, the package Makefile, for the initial compilation, and the get_vars.m function, for the just-in-time ones, perform the actual check and define an auxiliary macro if the latest version is found on the system.
No comments:
Post a Comment