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The value of supporting multiple compilers #848

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bernhold opened this issue May 12, 2021 · 2 comments · Fixed by #2076
Closed

The value of supporting multiple compilers #848

bernhold opened this issue May 12, 2021 · 2 comments · Fixed by #2076
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@markcmiller86
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@bernhold
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http://evan.nemerson.com/2021/05/04/portability-is-reliability/ is an interesting article. The real point is that you should run your code through multiple compilers and on multiple architectures where possible (with the warnings turned on) because different compilers catch different problems and different architectures may be sensitive to different problems. Such practices will help find bugs that may be very subtle and may not be triggered in most circumstances.

So I would not call it reliability in the sense that the scientific community uses it, but rather a debugging technique or software quality technique. But I think it is a useful idea.

There may be other resources out there where can supplement or better express this argument.
@markcmiller86
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Didn't read the ref. but title, Portability is Reliability reminds me of a project I worked part-time on years ago. It was a graphics library called VGL (Virtual Graphics Library -- developed by Jim Reus a colleague of mine at LLNL who has since retired), which was routinely built and run on Mac, Windows, Linux, Vax VMS, Amiga, Solaris and HP-UX, each with their native compilers.

We always wound up finding issues that were unique to one context and that were indeed real problems that other builds didn't catch. It gave us a lot of confidence that the code was pretty decent quality.

@bernhold
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Evan calls out the arm7 architecture as being particularly useful in places where x86 is too forgiving.

@bernhold bernhold added this to Idea Backlog in Content Development via automation May 12, 2021
@rinkug rinkug moved this from Idea backlog to Topic review in Content Development May 20, 2021
@bernhold bernhold added the content: curated For curated content label May 27, 2021
@pagrubel pagrubel moved this from Topic review to Ready to write in Content Development Apr 13, 2022
@markcmiller86 markcmiller86 self-assigned this Apr 21, 2024
@markcmiller86 markcmiller86 moved this from Ready to write to In progress in Content Development Apr 21, 2024
@markcmiller86 markcmiller86 mentioned this issue Apr 21, 2024
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Content Development automation moved this from In progress to Done May 13, 2024
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Add CC for portability is reliability betterscientificsoftware/bssw.io
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