std.concurrency wrapper over MPI?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Friday 05 August 2011 23:51:24 dsimcha wrote:
> I've finally bitten the bullet and learned MPI
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_passing_interface) for an ultra
> computationally intensive research project I've been working on lately.
>   I wrote all the MPI-calling code in D against the C API, using a very
> quick-and-dirty (i.e. not releasable) translation of the parts of the
> header I needed.
> 
> I'm halfway-thinking of writing a std.concurrency-like interface on top
> of MPI in D.  A few questions:
> 
> 1.  Is anyone besides me interested in this?

Personally, I've never heard of MPI and have no interest in it whatsoever, but 
I don't do much with concurrent programming. Others will probably be far more 
interested though.

> 3.  Would this be Phobos material even though it would depend on MPI, or
> would it better be kept as a 3rd party library?

If MPI is something which can be found by default on your typical OS install, 
then it may be okay to have it in Phobos. But in general, I would think that 
if you need to install 3rd party libraries to use it, it should probably be a 
3rd party library itself. It may be a bit of a grey area though. If we have 
many libraries such as that, then we may want to create an official (or at least 
pseudo-official) project which contains the major ones to make them easy to find. 
Regardless, we _don't_ want Phobos to require extra dependencies which aren't 
normally found on your typical OS install such that you have to install them 
even if you don't use the functionality that they're needed for.

- Jonathan M Davis