Porting the UAL SXF Parser to a Windows Platform
Yuri Malitsky, USDOE Office of Science (SC) · 2003
The Unified Accelerator Libraries (UAL) is a modularized environment for “simulating a variety of properties of a variety of accelerators using a variety of simulation codes and methods.” Because of this wide spectrum of applications, support of multiple platforms is an essential requirement for the UAL software. UAL was originally developed on the Sun platform with the native Sun WorkShop CC and GNU gcc. Working simultaneously on these two compilers proved to be an ideal combination, because while the WorkShop provided a commercial quality integrated development environment (IDE), the gcc improved the portability of the software. Recently, because of the sharp increase in demand for parallel applications and the rise of Linux popularity, UAL has been transferred from Sun to the Linux platform. Linux, however, does not have an IDE that can compete with the commercial toolkits available on Windows, such as Microsoft Visual Studio and Borland C++ Builder. Therefore it is tempting to port UAL to Windows and reestablish the previous development environment with two different compilers and a commercial IDE. As a first step to this porting process, the Standard eXchange Format parser has been chosen since it is a part of UAL but was also designed as an independent tool. The aim of this project was to establish a procedure and to explore any problems associated with the deployment process.