On Sep 9, 2008, at 2:45 AM, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
At the MPI Forum meeting in Dublin, the MPI ABI meeting was... er...
shall we say, "spirited." :-) Both the benefits and drawbacks of an
MPI ABI are widely contended (it's a surprisingly complex topic).
it sounds quite daunting.
It is. :-)
- If it is ever completed, MPI ABI compliance will be a separate
entity
from the MPI 2.x and 3.x standards. ABI compliance will be a
checkmark
for an MPI implementation, but will be unrelated to an
implementation's
2.1, 2.2, 3.0, ...etc. compliance.
How can that be possible? An MPI ABI will have to be versioned in
the same way that the API is versioned. You can have an ABI version
for each API version though, I guess.
That is correct. My first statement wasn't entirely correct --
"unrelated" is probably not quite the correct word. Each ABI version
will be tied to a specific API version. What I was trying to say is
that an implementation can be claim to be API compliant, even if it's
not ABI compliant.
And of course the MPI C++ ABI will require specifying a C++ ABI
(which, for Windows, means specifying the compiler and possibly its
major release number used), but this is venturing off into details.
Not just Windows, right?
Ditto for Fortran.
--
Jeff Squyres
Cisco Systems
