wolfsim-announce — low-traffic list for updates and fixes

[Alexander R. <ale...@gm...>]

Hey all,

WOLFSIM 2.3 is out.  This is a transitional release, as most work is
going into releasing 3.0 (parallelized wolfsim).  This version has a
lot of the latest upgrades for still single-threaded modes.

FEATURES:
 * Maximize use of compiler optimizations. (Smoothed out some bugs
that were preventing this) My (admittedly limited) testing showed a >
60% decrease in runtime between the normal and the optimized builds.
 * Prebuilt packages for Linux, Mac, PC (* some restrictions apply).
These are built for intel i686 processors, so if you're running
anything different (a PowerPC Mac for instance) you will probably have
to build your own binary... which is easy with:
 * Premade build scripts.  Automated building is easier on everyone,
and if you want to build it manually it gives you a basis on what
files are needed.
 * New Examples directory to build simulations off of (you may need to
to this, see pt.4 of 'known bugs').

BUILD NOTES:
 * These share a code base, but the windows build uses a different set
of source files (well, the exact same code arranged in different
files) as everything else.  The biggest difference is that to build
for windows (besides using a windows compilder) you have to add a
define for WINDOWS.  All this does is fix the mkdir() function (which
is different on windows than Mac/Linux).
 * Warnings on the first run about missing .o files are fine, these
are the object files (intermediate between the source code and final
executable). It will generate these the first time you run build.sh,
so don't be worried about missing them.

KNOWN BUGS:
 * input is only taken from 'Input.txt'  sitting in the same directory
that the binary was run from.
 * Execution fails on a mis-formed input file without any kind of
useful error message.
 * Two library functions are using uninitialized variables. (Tracking
this one down w/ the original authors)
 * Old Java GUI (probably) does not match new input file format.

CURRENT DEVELOPMENT:
If you want to check out the source code from our subversion
repository (just checkout the trunk to get the latest), you can see
some of whats being worked on right now:
 * Input can now be specified on the command line!
 * Fails w/ a useful warning message on malformed input files.
 * Parallelization (OpenMP #pragma omp parallel for)

Questions/Comments/Thoughts/Build Errors/Run Errors?  I'm Alex Ray
(aj...@nc...), you can email me.

Thanks
~Alex