On Thursday, December 09, 2010 09:15:19 am Frank Loeffler wrote:
On Thu, Dec 09, 2010 at 12:04:23PM -0500, John Baker wrote:
- Is there a good reason why HDF5 needs the C++ libraries in Cactus?
Out of convenience for people building c++ tools against it. I don't know of any thorn actually using the c++ bindings.
- Does hdf5 1.8.5 even support the c++ interface?
Yes, I frequently build it. However, as you already stated, c++ bindings and parallel hdf5 support are not supported together.
- What should we be doing differently to work around these issues?
I the light of discussions on hdf5 lists which describe the c++ bindings as buggy and not maintained, we should probably not use them in any code - and also not build them within Cactus.
This of course leaves the users of tools in the cold which still use the c++ API. At the moment only the Carpet Visit plugin comes to my mind though - which should be possible to be build against the hdf5 library within visit itself. Who else uses the c++ hdf5 interface?
Given the bad support of the C++ API of HDF5, and all associated incompatibilities, I wanted to switch back to the C version in the VisIt plugin and the upcoming Nirvana file format. Other than that, I am currently not aware of any other C++ HDF5 calls within Cactus.
cheers, Christian