H5Part development and discussion

[John Biddiscombe <biddisco AT cscs.ch>]

Hello All,

I generally do my daily development work on Windows using MS Visual 
Studio and had to make some tweaks to H5Part to get it to compile (real 
work takes place on the cluster of some other machine running 
unix/linux). I found subtle differences in Visual Studio version 7 and 8 
and have some patches for h5part to contribute.

I would also like to contribute CMake support in the form of CMakeLists 
files for h5part.

I found just one bug in H5PartSetNumParticles if you attempt to use it 
when compiled with Parallel IO, but you not actually using MPI parallel. 
An extra check for MPI communicator null fixes it.

I have a question that perhaps someone knows the answer to.
When I compile H5Part on a unix/linux machine, the H5Part.c and 
H5Block.c files are compiled as C without problem, but under windows I 
get a great many errors unless I compile them as C++. Given that the 
important parts are protected within extern "C" {...} declarations, is 
anyone aware of any fundamental difference between the ways that gcc and 
microsoft compilers handle C/C++ that might be significant. Compiling as 
C++ is really no problem, but I was surprised that these files didn't 
compile as plain C under win32.

I only have svn read access at the moment so I will happily send 
patches, but if you are happy to give me write access then please do and 
I'll commit changes.

Thanks

JB


--
John Biddiscombe,                            email:biddisco @ cscs.ch
http://www.cscs.ch/about/BJohn.php
CSCS, Swiss National Supercomputing Centre  | Tel:  +41 (91) 610.82.07
Via Cantonale, 6928 Manno, Switzerland      | Fax:  +41 (91) 610.82.82