Portable code development in C
Stewart A. Brown · University of North Texas Digital Library (University of North Texas) · 1990
With a new generation of high performance computers appearing around us on a time scale of months, a new challenge for developers of simulation codes is to write and maintain production codes that are both highly portable and maximally efficient. My contention is that C is the language that is both best suited to that goal and is widely available today. GLF is a new code written mainly in C which is intended to have all of the XRASER physics and run on any platform of interest. It demonstrates the power of the C paradigm for code developers and flexibility and ease of use for the users. Three fundamental problems are discussed: the C/UNIX development environment; the supporting tools and libraries which handle data and graphics portability issues; and the advantages of C in numerical simulation code development.