Charm++ parallel programming system

["McCandless, Brian C." <mccandless3 AT llnl.gov>]

Thanks for the replies.
The debugger issue was also a problem, so I'm glad that is being fixed as
well.

  Brian


On 8/14/12 10:00 AM, "Phil Miller" 
<mille121 AT illinois.edu>
 wrote:

>On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 11:16 AM, McCandless, Brian C.
><mccandless3 AT llnl.gov>
> wrote:
>> 1.  The error message when there is a syntax error in the .ci file is
>>not
>> very helpful.   I get a line number and a message that says "syntax
>>error",
>> and that's it.  For example, I recently had the bug of typing
>> "[reductionTarget]" instead of "[reductiontarget]" and the line number
>>was
>> no where near my mistake.  Is there a better way to find bugs like
>>these?
>
>This is something that we are well aware of (we write a lot of Charm++
>code), and intend to fix. When there's dedicated effort toward it, we
>plan to catalog various erroneous inputs and see what we can do to the
>translator's grammar to get them reported cleanly. This is somewhat
>difficult because we're just using yacc, but should be doable over the
>next several months.
>
>> 2.  The other sort of error is a C++ error in the SDAG coding.  Here I
>>get
>> the C++ error message, but the line number is at the
>><chareName>_SDAG_CODE
>> macro.  Sometimes it's easy to figure these out from the context, but
>> sometimes it's not.  What is normally an automatic process of jumping
>>to the
>> next compiler warning/error in my editor,  now requires a bit more
>>mental
>> energy to figure out.
>
>This is partially addressed in the current development version, and
>may be fully addressed in the development version fairly soon.
>
>Basically, I've already implemented code to emit SDAG-generated
>function definitions one-by-one in the foo.def.h file, with only their
>declaration remaining inside that macro. Early reports on it so far
>say that it makes this debugging much easier, including bugs
>encountered at runtime and tackled with gdb, because you can actually
>see the source listed there, too.
>
>A new student in the lab, Ralf, is working on teaching the translator
>to emit line number information from the original .ci file in those
>function declarations. After this week, I'll have some spare cycles to
>review what he's done and hopefully help wrap that up and integrate
>it.
>
>> What do Charm++ developers typically do to speed up the development
>>cycle in
>> these cases?
>
>As you can hopefully get from the above: we fix it :-).
>
>Thanks for writing, and I hope your explorations with Charm++ take you
>far.
>
>Phil