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Announcing GooFit 2.0

The next version of the CUDA/OpenMP fitting program for HEP analysis, GooFit 2.0, has been released. GooFit is now easy to build on a wide variety of Unix systems, and supports debuggers and IDEs. GooFit is faster, has unit tests, and working examples. More PDFs and examples have been added, as well as newly released example datasets that are downloaded automatically. GooFit now has built in support for MPI, and can use that to deploy to multiple graphics cards on the same machine. A new command line parser (CLI11) and drastically improved logging and errors have made code easier to write and debug. Usage of GooFit specific terminology is now reduced, using standard Thrust or CUDA terms when possible, lowering the barrier for new developers. A new Python script has been added to assist users converting from pre 2.0 code.

Announcing CLI11 Version 1.0

CLI11, a powerful library for writing command line interfaces in C++11, has just been released. There are no requirements beyond C++11 support (and even <regex> support not required). It works on Mac, Linux, and Windows, and has 100% test coverage on all three systems. You can simply drop in a single header file (CLI11.hpp available in releases) to use CLI11 in your own application. Other ways to integrate it into a build system are listed in the README.

Perfect forwarding for methods

I often see perfect forwarding listed for constructor arguments, but not usually for functions with a return or methods. Here is my solution for an method method of class Cls

template<typename ...Args>
static auto method(Cls* cls, Args &&  ...args)
  -> typename std::result_of<decltype(&Cls::method)(Cls, Args...)>::type {
    return cls->method(std::forward<Args>(args)...);
}

This is useful if you want to call protected classes from a “helper” friend class, for example, to expose them to tests without having to require GoogleTest/GoogleMock to be avaible for regular users.

Lua Environment Modules

This is a guide to setting up Lmod (lua environment modules) on a CentOS system. I’ve used a similar procedure to set them up on a Mac, as well, so this is still a useful guide to the workings of Lmod if you use a different system; mostly paths will change. On a Mac, you’ll want to install Lmod from the science tap in brew.

There are several good pages covering environment modules (TCL version), but not many that use the newer Lua syntax. This document aims to fill that roll.