[PYTHON C++-SIG] Re: LLNL Python/C++ integration: current status (fwd)

[Johann Hibschman]

My apologies to everyone if this is a duplicate, but I suspect that some 
system problems on my end ate this message the first time I tried to send 
it.  It wasn't on the python.org archive when I checked, so here it goes 
again...

Johann Hibschman
johann at physics.berkeley.edu   

---------- Forwarded message ----------

BTW, there's a real STL-related question buried at the end of this, for 
all you who have concluded that this debate is going nowhere...  :-)

On Thu, 13 Feb 1997, Geoffrey Furnish wrote:

> Reactions like this are inevitable.  It is because I am sympathetic to
> such considerations that I put the fair-warning clause in the
> announcement.  That way you don't waste time some day pulling down the
> patch set only to find you can't use it.  At least now you know,
> without wasting any of your precious time.  And time /is/ extremely
> precious in academia.

Yes, and thank you for that warning.  I understand your position in not 
wanting to waste *your* precious time on writing work-arounds for 
problems that your compiler doesn't have.

However, I would like to see enough cooperation and awareness of the
compiler issue to consider containing uses of things like member function
templates and RTTI code to discrete portions of the code.  Those discrete
portions can then be worked around with elaborate hacks by the
compiler-challenged. 

I don't know your code, so I don't know if this is already true, if this
is nigh-impossible, or if this is possible with minor adjustments.

> There are many ways to address the situation from your end.  Not the
> least of which is to actively participate in g++ development. 

Well, the Sun CC compiler I have access to here works better than g++, so 
I don't have too much experience in the innards of g++.  But you're 
right: just whining isn't going to do anything, and I hope I didn't come 
across as saying that I expect the LLNL people to do everything for me.
I appreciate the amount of work you've already done on this.

I'm still climbing the C++ learning curve.  I just looked into STL
recently and was struck by the similarity of the feel of their standard
classes to the standard Python data structures.  If some of the
template-intensive code can be replaced by STL calls, then end-users could
simply use whatever STL implementation they may have at their site.  That
would confine some of the portability problems to a well-defined library
which has probably already been ported. 

Personally, I was thinking about gradually implementing a STL-to-Python 
conversion, as I needed it in the code I'm writing for my own use.  Does 
anyone think this is a good idea?  If not, why not?

Cheers,

- Johann Hibschman


P.S.: In any case, I have to be nice to you guys, since I will probably be
attempting to borrow a beam simulation code from either the LBL beam
people or the LLNL plasma folks once I finish deriving the distribution
function.  Heck, my advisor spends every other Friday or so down there, so
I'll probably eventually get pulled along to say hi. 

---
Johann Hibschman
johann at physics.berkeley.edu   




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