[Mpi-forum] ABI

[N.M. Maclaren]

On Dec 4 2013, Jed Brown wrote:
>
>However, the question of integer (MPICH) versus pointer (OMPI) handles
>is a long-standing impasse.

Yes, but I don't think that it's the worst issue.

>Suppose MPICH used intptr_t for handles.  I believe pointers are treated
>the same as integers for all the common calling conventions.

I wouldn't bet on it, especially not in the medium term.  It's true on
systems like the x86 (and its predecessor in dominance System/370), but
I don't know all of the systems that either of those has been ported to.
It certaainly used not to be the case.

> This
>leaves a question of the predefined constants, which are currently
>compile-time constants of some sort (either integers or addresses of
>privately-defined structs), but I'm not aware of text in the standard
>that requires them to be defined in a header.  That is, can we have
>
>  extern MPI_Datatype MPI_INT;
>
>in the header and leave it to the library to provide the value?

The killer there is whether they can be used in initialisations.  That
would break:

    static MPI_Datatype weeble = MPI_INT;

Lastly, there are some very nasty differences that would have to be
tackled, such as:

    Attributes (especially the I/O ones).  I meant to propose some fixes
for MPI 3 (the current specification is weird), but didn't do it.  Sorry.
But there are probably quite a lot of such corner-cases.

    Implementation assumptions.  Not just signals and threading, but
the handling of stdin/stdout/stderr, passive one-sided and more.

This doesn't mean that it can't be done, merely that it isn't as easy
as just agreeing the types and values.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.