On Friday, 6 October 2017 at 23:49:33 UTC, Bastiaan Veelo wrote:
On Friday, 6 October 2017 at 22:16:09 UTC, Peter Jacobs wrote:
Eilmer is a simulation code for studying high-speed
compressible flows. Early versions were written in C and then
C++. Version 4 is a complete rewrite in D, with Lua for
configuration and run-time scripting. Code and documentation
may be found at http://cfcfd.mechmining.uq.edu.au/eilmer/
This note is principally to say thank you to all of the people
who have made the D programming language and its ecosystem.
Being mechanical engineers, we are occasional but serious
programmers. For a number of years, we struggled with C++ and
a code base of growing complexity. In 2014, we made a serious
commitment to reworking the entire code into D. In mid-2017,
the new code was complete enough for general use and it is
currently being used in a fourth-year course on computational
fluid dynamics. The D programming language has enhanced our
programming experience and, for that, we are grateful to the
many people who have built the foundation upon which we build
our flow simulation code.
Cheers,
Peter Jacobs and Rowan Gollan
Congtatulations on a job well done. Your motivation for use of
the D Programming Language is the same as ours. I found your
paper describing the rewrite [1] very interesting, I think it
deserves a more prominent mention here and on the usual news
sites.
Bastiaan
[1]
http://cfcfd.mechmining.uq.edu.au/eilmer/pdfs/T0316-eilmer-dlang-v2.pdf
I like how you have setup instructions and docs on your site.
Two relevant quotes from the paper:
"With the recent maturing of the programming language D as a good
alternative to C++ for statically-checked, natively-compiled
code, we have taken the opportunity to rebuild our simulation
code. The D programming language provides the conveniences of
Python, the run-time performance of C++ and the ability to be
directly linked to C language libraries. It appears that we can
have it all and we can have it now. One good example of where the
rebuild has resulted in significant improvements is the
viscous-flux calculation code. In the C++ code, about 2500 lines
were used, and this had the extra complication of requiring the
M4 preprocessor to produce the actual C++ code (of length 5580
lines) that was given to the compiler. The new D language code
amounts to 733 lines."
"Conclusion
We have spent much of a year building a new compressible flow
simulation code from scratch, in a relatively new language. So
far, our experience with the D programming language has been
positive, with a fairly capable simulation code being constructed
with a few months of effort by two people. Together with some
code redesign, the D programming language has allowed the
construction of a code base that is much simpler than its C++
predecessor but is just as fast."
Mike, want to stick this on proggit and HN?
