Re: [Gomp-discuss] Questions, questions

[Scott Robert Ladd]

Lars Segerlund wrote:
> g95 is quite good now, and it's frontend is VERY easy to work with,
> so I think it would be safe to say it's ready for OpenMP.

Wonderful. I've been studying gfortran for some time now, using it on a
regular basis and working on some patches (integer ranges, structure
returns). I'm waiting to submit the patches until the integration of
tree-ssa into GCC mainline is complete.

I have much less familiarity with the C and C++ front ends -- even
though those are my primary langauges!

Which brings up a question: Will we need to implement *three* versions
of OpenMP, given that C and C++ have different frontends?

> The thing about academic fortran programmers are that often they are
> afraid of computers :-) ... so they want a magic 'parrallell thingie'
> to solve their parallellization issues for them. Which is good and
> bad, and then there are the exeptions which forces progress on the
> mediocre crowd :-) ( Pun intended ).

C++ programmers aren't much different. And the "magic" has value in 
terms of portability and simplicity; I can create an OpenMP application 
that scales automatically and cleanly, whereas to do with same thing 
manually is rather more cumbersome.

I'm in the midst of manually parallelizing an application, making me 
quite aware of these realities.

> As for your point 3. we decided to use Posix threads, and abstract
> the rest in the lib. ( thus different thread implementation and so on
> different lib, no code change), i think :-) ..

Sounds good.

--
Scott Robert Ladd
Coyote Gulch Productions (http://www.coyotegulch.com)
Software Invention for High-Performance Computing