[Mpi3-tools] MPI handles interface

[Jeff Squyres]

On Apr 21, 2009, at 5:56 AM, Ashley Pittman wrote:

> > Could I get some comments on the group as to the general style of  
> what
> > I did?
>
> The general style looks OK to me, without digging too far however I'm
> concerned about the idea of the DLL allocating memory and then having
> the debugger free it, this seems like a recipe for disaster to me.
>


In addition to John's reply...

The suggestion was made on the call yesterday to [effectively] convert  
the (image, image_info, process, process_info, c_comm) tuple into an  
opaque handle that is then queried by the individual functions.   
Hence, instead of passing that big tuple to each of the query  
functions (and therefore potentially having the DLL re-lookup the data  
in each query function), have the DLL do all the lookups at once,  
possibly store it in a DLL-internal One Big Struct, and then return an  
opaque handle to it to the debugger.  The debugger then uses that  
handle for the individual query functions, which then become quite  
simple in the DLL (i.e., copy from the handle to the OUT params).  The  
debugger eventually invokes a function to free the handle.

I haven't made these modifications yet, but I will.

-- 
Jeff Squyres
Cisco Systems