[petsc-dev] on implementing a new PetscViewer

[Marco Zocca]

Dear PETSc,
 in writing the foreign-function wrappers for the library in Haskell,
I found the need for an operation that copies the contents of a Mat or
Vec, in the spirit of the Matlab socket-based ones (in both
directions).

Roughly speaking, I need to represent the `peek`, `sizeOf` and
`alignment` operations (or an alternate PetscViewer that dumps in the
memory of a single node).

Of course this wouldn't be used in cases when the sum of the local
block sizes exceeds some maximum allowed by an individual machine.

Thank you in advance,

Marco Zocca