Announcing GooFit 2.1

GooFit logo

GooFit 2.1 introduces the full-featured Python bindings to GooFit. These bindings mimic the C++ usage of GooFit, including bindings for all PDFs, and also provide NumPy-centric conversions, live Jupyter notebook printing, pip install, and more. Most of the examples in C++ are provided in Python form, as well.

Several other API changes were made. Observables are now distinguished from Variables and provided as a separate class. Both these classes are now passed around by copy everywhere.1 The three and four body amplitude classes have been refactored and simplified. OpenMP is now supported via homebrew on macOS; GooFit is one of the only packages that currently can build with OpenMP on the default macOS compiler. Eigen is now available, and CLI11 has been updated to version 1.3.

GooFit 2.1 will receive continuing support while development on GooFit 2.2 presses on with a new indexing scheme for PDFs.

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Include What You Use

Include-what-you-use is a promising little tool for cleaning up a codebase. It didn’t end up working for the use I had for it, but it still could be useful. Here is a quick guideline on installing it on macOS.

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Comparing CLI11 and Boost PO

CLI11 started years ago as a set of tools built on Boost Program Options (PO), and has since matured into the powerful, easy-to-use stand-alone library it is available today. If you would like to see the original inspiration for CLI11, look at Program.hpp in CLI11 0.1. The rest of the post will focus on a comparison between making a CLI app in the two libraries. I am going to assume that you are preparing fairly basic but non-trivial programs in the following comparison.

TL;DR: CLI11 is more concise, and provides more control with better defaults in many cases, but was inspired by Boost PO.

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Announcing CLI11 1.3

CLI11, a powerful library for writing beautiful command line interfaces in C++11, has been updated to 1.3, the largest update ever. CLI11 is more powerful than ever, and has simpler and more consistent parsing under the hood.

This version focused on refactoring several key systems to ensure correct behavior in the interaction of different settings. Most caveats about features only working on the main App have been addressed, and extra arguments have been reworked. Inheritance of defaults makes configuring CLI11 much easier without having to subclass. Policies add new ways to handle multiple arguments to match your favorite CLI programs. Error messages and help messages are better and more flexible. Several bugs and odd behaviors in the parser have been fixed.

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Announcing GooFit 2.0

The next version of the premier 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.

The file structure of GooFit and the build system have been completely revamped. The fake nvcc features have been removed, as have the rootstuff copies of ROOT classes. PDFs are now organized by type and compile and link separately. Multiple PDF caching support has improved. The build system now uses CMake and manages external libraries.

A new feature of the CMake build system is GooFit Packages, which are complete packages that can be added to GooFit and built, allowing analysis code to live in a separate location from GooFit, rather than the old method of simply forking GooFit and adding your analysis manually. A GooFit Package can be made into an example trivially. See this package for an example.

GooFit 2.0 will receive continuing support while development on GooFit 2.1 presses on.

GooFit on GitHubGooFit webpage • API documentation

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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.

The library was inspired the Python libraries Plumbum and Click, and incorporates many of their user friendly features. The library is extensively documented, with a friendly introduction, a tutorial filled (in progress) GitBook, and more technical API docs.

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