[petsc-users] RAW binary write

[Lisandro Dalcin]

On Tue, 4 Dec 2018 at 19:53, Matthew Knepley <knepley at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 4, 2018 at 11:11 AM Lisandro Dalcin via petsc-users <
> petsc-users at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
>
>> PetscByteSwap ? But be careful, you should (1) vec get array, byteswap,
>> vec restore array, (2) view, (3) vec get array, byteswap, vec restore
>> array. Of course, if you do not care about the final Vec contents, you can
>> just omit step (3) and let it be, let it be...
>>
>> PS: Eventually, PETSc binary viewers should gain an API like
>> PetscViewerBinarySetByteOrder(viewer, PETSC_LITTLE_ENDIAN) ...
>>
>
> Note that this enables exactly what we wanted to avoid, namely binary
> files that an incompatible with some installations.
>
>
1) As a confessed libertarian (not to be confused with liberal), IMHO, we
should not prevent power users to do something if they explicitly ask for
it. Maybe someone has to dump a binary file in little endian with no
headers, so that some other crappy software  that do not care about
endianness can happily read the file and do something with it. Why would we
not add the feature (at least if someone contributes it)?

2) The whole native binary I/O in PETSc is messy.

3) In an ideal word, every PETSc binary file should start with a header
8bitEndianFlag,sizeof(PetscInt),sizeof(PetscReal),sizeof(PetscScalar), And
maybe readers should handle gracefully binary files produced by PETSc
builds with different integer/real sizes.

-- 
Lisandro Dalcin
============
Research Scientist
Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Sciences & Engineering (CEMSE)
Extreme Computing Research Center (ECRC)
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)
http://ecrc.kaust.edu.sa/

4700 King Abdullah University of Science and Technology
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Office Phone: +966 12 808-0459
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