Scientific Computing

Most environment variable have alphanumeric names and don’t need any special consideration to access. On Windows, some important programs still use the “Program Files (x86)” directory, denoted by environment variable “ProgramFiles(x86)”.

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.10)

set(px $ENV{ProgramFiles\(x86\)})

message(STATUS "${px}")

Most other code languages don’t have any particular issues using environment variables named with special characters.

All of the following print like:

C:\Program Files (x86)

Matlab:

getenv("ProgramFiles(x86)")

Python:

python -c "import os; print(os.environ['ProgramFiles(x86)'])"

C++:

#include <cstdlib>
#include <iostream>

int main()
{
    std::cout << std::getenv("ProgramFiles(x86)") << "\n";
    return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}

Fortran:

program env

implicit none

integer :: i
character(100) :: path

call get_environment_variable('ProgramFiles(x86)', path, status=i)
if (i/=0) error stop "env var ProgramFiles(x86) not found"

print '(a)', path

end program env

Matplotlib plots with datetime axes can benefit from rotating axes tick labels or concise tick labels to avoid overlapping text.

Example code used in this post with synthetic data:

from matplotlib.pyplot import Figure
import matplotlib.dates as mdates
from datetime import datetime, timedelta

def datetime_range(start: datetime, end: datetime, step: timedelta) -> list[datetime]:
    """like range() for datetime"""
    return [start + i * step for i in range((end - start) // step)]

t = datetime_range(datetime(2021, 1, 1), datetime(2021, 1, 2), timedelta(minutes=30))
y = range(len(t))

Rotate datetime tick labels

If rotating tick labels, the overall axes typically need to be positioned to allow for the rotated labels, otherwise the tick labels can be cut off the figure edges. The axes position is updated automatically with constrained_layout option of figure().

fg = Figure(constrained_layout=True)
ax = fg.gca()

ax.plot(t, y)
ax.set_xlabel('time')
ax.set_ylabel('y')
ax.tick_params(axis="x", labelrotation=30)  # arbitrary rotation amount

fg.savefig("example.png")

Matplotlib date formatting

Matplotlib datetime axes have numerous formatting options. Here we show the ConciseFormatter, which may avoid the need to rotate tick labels.

fg = Figure(constrained_layout=True)
ax = fg.gca()

ax.plot(t, y)
ax.set_xlabel('time')
ax.set_ylabel('y')

ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter(
    mdates.ConciseDateFormatter(ax.xaxis.get_major_locator()))

fg.savefig("example.png")

If a DLL conflicts with a programs needed DLLs, the program may quit with a specific message, or it may silently exit. The return code may correspond to segfault or other error. To help see if a DLL conflict is occurring, use gdb to run the program. This works even for general programs that weren’t built on the system. We suggest obtaining GDB via MSYS2. If there is a problem with a DLL, GDB will often print the name of the DLL. If the DLL is in an unexpected location, this may indicate a directory that should not be in environment variable Path.

Start GDB Fortran debugger: assuming executable myprog

gdb myprog.exe

Run program from (gdb) prompt:

r

On macOS when using the default “AppleClang” compiler in a Fortran project where GFortran objects are linked with C/C++ objects, the ld linker may emit warnings like:

ld: warning: could not create compact unwind for ...: register .. saved somewhere other than in frame
ld: warning: could not create compact unwind for ...: registers .. and .. not saved contiguously in frame

This is an actual issue because C++ exception handling will not completely work when this warning is emitted from C++ code coupled with Fortran code. In general, using C++ exception handling within C++ code that is linked with Fortran code will work just fine, except when this warning is issued. The solution is to use GNU GCC C++ compiler with GFortran instead of mixing AppleClang with GFortran.

Specifying environment variable:

LDFLAGS="$LDFLAGS -Wl,-no_compact_unwind"

removes the warning, but this also disables C++ exception handling so it is not recommended.

It is possible to programmatically detect this link conflict from CMake using try_compile.

try_compile(abi_compile
PROJECT abi_check
SOURCE_DIR ${CMAKE_CURRENT_LIST_DIR}/abi_check
OUTPUT_VARIABLE abi_output
)

if(abi_output MATCHES "ld: warning: could not create compact unwind for")
  message(WARNING "C++ exception handling will not work reliably due to incompatible compilers:
  C++ compiler ${CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER_ID} ${CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER_VERSION}
  Fortran compiler ${CMAKE_Fortran_COMPILER_ID} ${CMAKE_Fortran_COMPILER_VERSION}"
  )
endif()

where directory “abi_check” contains a small C program that links with a Fortran program.

CMake has built-in support for C/C++ static code analysis tools such as CppCheck. Apply CppCheck to CMake targets with CMakeLists.txt by setting CMAKE_CXX_CPPCHECK.

File “cppcheck.supp” contains suppressions for false positives. NOTE: CMake runs cppcheck from an arbitrary directory, so per-file suppressions in the file don’t work as usual. To suppress a warning for a specific file, use the --suppress option to cppcheck in CMakeLists.txt like:

set_property(TARGET MyTarget PROPERTY CXX_CPPCHECK "${CMAKE_CXX_CPPCHECK};--suppress=containerOutOfBounds")

Don’t just blindly modify code based on CppCheck output. Think of it like any code analysis tool–there are false positives (and false negatives).

A Windows short path can be converted to long path and vice versa using the Windows C library as in this standalone, single source file example.

When moving between Linux systems that often default to Bash, and macOS systems that often default to Zsh, one may wish to change the default shell parameters.

For example, to remove duplicate entries in shell history, so that pressing “up” on repeated commands doesn’t make you press “up” repeatedly to get to the last non-duplicated command, set like the following.

Bash: ~/.inputrc: ignore duplicate lines, and omits lines that start with space.

export HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth

Zsh: ~/.zshrc: approximately the equivalent of the above Bash setting.

setopt hist_ignore_dups
setopt hist_ignore_space

Users (or developers!) may not realize that the shell expands glob asterisk * unless enclosed in quotes. This can surprise users unfamiliar with this shell behavior, say when using Python argparse with position-based arguments. Say a user has a single file to process in a directory, and doesn’t want to type the long filename, so they type:

python myScript.py ~/data/*.h5 32

Here we assume myScript.py expects two positional arguments, the first being a filename, and the second being an integer. If more than one “*.h5” file subsequently exists and myScript.py is run, the actual input to Python would be like:

python myScript.py ~/data/file1.h5 ~/data/file2.h5 32

Which causes a Python argparse exception.

To see what the shell is going to expand to, with default keybindings and Bash or Zsh at least, press after typing the command these keys:

CMake ExternalProject works for many types of sub-projects across CMake generators. An implementation detail of Ninja is by default ExternalProject doesn’t print progress until each ExternalProject step is finished. For large external projects that take several minutes to download and build, users could be confused thinking CMake has frozen up. To make ExternalProject show live progress as it does with Makefiles generators, add the USES_TERMINAL_* true arguments to ExternalProject_Add.

ExternalProject_Add(
  BigProject
  ...
  USES_TERMINAL_DOWNLOAD true
  USES_TERMINAL_UPDATE true
  USES_TERMINAL_PATCH true
  USES_TERMINAL_CONFIGURE true
  USES_TERMINAL_BUILD true
  USES_TERMINAL_INSTALL true
  USES_TERMINAL_TEST true
)

“USES_TERMINAL* true” forces ExternalProject steps to run sequentially. For large projects this is ordinarily not significant.

CMake doesn’t print the Generator version by default. Sometimes bugs are related to a specific generator version. Reveal CMake generator version like this snippet.