dolfin team mailing list archive

[Anders Logg <logg@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Oct 26, 2004 at 02:00:30PM -0500, Matthew Knepley wrote:

>      I, of course, would advocate using an IDL (since that is what I do).
> However, I really want to take issue with the idea that we NEED pieces in
> C++. If SWIG has shown anything, its that the implementation language should
> not be important and wrappers are fairly easy. Much more important is the
> interface and the packaging.
> 
>               Matt

That's a good point. We don't need to have any code in C++.
But there are good reasons for providing a C++ *interface*:

If we cannot provide a complete toolset that covers every problem,
people will have to implement some parts of the code themselves, and
people prefer to use C++. With people I mean people like ourselves in
the business of developing new algorithms and methods for PDEs, but not
necessarily in the business of developing tools. I don't think you can
say too people who want to implement a new algorithm that they should
go ahead and create a low-level library for that feature and then
create a wrapper for their new library.

It all depends on what you want to do. If you want to create the best
possible tools, then optimized low-level libraries with wrappers might
be the best way. But if you want to make your system
(user-)extensible, I would like to see a C++ interface, since it
allows you to implement fairly efficient new algorithms in the same
language as the interface of the toolset you are using.

/Anders