[petsc-dev] why have all this stuff

[Matthew Knepley]

On Fri, Oct 14, 2011 at 10:21 AM, Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:

>
>  Why have all this stuff?
>
>  http://petsc.cs.iit.edu/petsc/petsc-dev/rev/49c718f99df2
>
>   Why not build into the PETSc C code and structures any (small) additional
> stuff needed to do all this? Why create another entirely new duplicate
> structure in python to do it?


Alright reasons:

1) C sucks for this kind of processing. I use the right language for the
right job. If not, we could do everything with C++ templates.

2) It meshes with the build system, so I can build several versions of the
code. You do this with make, which is quaint.

Good reasons:

3) This is for runs across many versions of the code. I can't even switch
MPI_COMM_WORLD sizes in your model.

    Matt


>
>    Barry
>
-- 
What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their experiments
is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their experiments
lead.
-- Norbert Wiener
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