Archive
Clone, configure, build and test M4RI
I’m new to the autotools world, so I was rather helpless when I first looked at M4RI. Say I have patched a file in M4RI. The problem now is figuring out how to configure, build, and test the patched M4RI tree. The solution below was kindly communicated to me by the lead M4RI maintainer Martin Albrecht.
$ hg clone http://bitbucket.org/malb/m4ri $ cd m4ri/ $ autoreconf --install $ ./configure $ make $ make check
Optimized parity testing
To test the parity of an integer is to determine whether it is even or odd. Letting n = 132469, we can test the parity of n by computing its value modulo 2. This can be done either by using the Sage built-in mod function, the Python modulo operator %, or by using the Python bitwise operator &. The operator & is bitwise conjunction, i.e. it corresponds to multiplication over the Galois field 
sage: n = 132469 sage: mod(n, 2).lift() 1 sage: mod(n, 2) 1 sage: n % 2 1 sage: n & 1 1
However, the test using the bitwise operator & is the fastest of all:
sage: %timeit mod(n, 2).lift() 625 loops, best of 3: 42.2 micro second per loop sage: %timeit mod(n, 2) 625 loops, best of 3: 42.2 micro second per loop sage: %timeit n % 2 625 loops, best of 3: 1.22 micro second per loop sage: %timeit n & 1 625 loops, best of 3: 1.02 micro second per loop
The program below demonstrates how to do parity testing using C.
#include <stdio.h>
/* Parity testing using bitwise AND.
*/
static void parity_and(int n)
{
if (n & 1)
printf("%i is odd\n", n);
else
printf("%i is even\n", n);
}
/* Parity testing using the modulus operator.
*/
static void parity_mod(int n)
{
if (n % 2)
printf("%i is odd\n", n);
else
printf("%i is even\n", n);
}
int main(void)
{
int n = 132469;
int m = 132470;
printf("Parity testing using modulus operator\n");
parity_mod(n);
parity_mod(m);
printf("Parity testing using bitwise AND\n");
parity_and(n);
parity_and(m);
return 0;
}
The output of the program is:
Parity testing using modulus operator 132469 is odd 132470 is even Parity testing using bitwise AND 132469 is odd 132470 is even
Tools for C development
This post collects free and open source software tools that are useful when you do software development in C. For a survey of software development tools for scientific computation, see A Survey of C and C++ Software Tools for Computational Science by D.J. Worth, C. Greenough and L.S. Chin. See The Art, Science, and Engineering of Software Development by Steve McConnell for some best practices.
Lint tools
- Cppcheck: A tool for static C/C++ code analysis.
- Splint: Annotation-assisted lightweight static checking.
Documentation generators
- Natural Docs: documentation generator for multiple programming languages.
- ROBODoc
- Sphinx: A tool that makes it easy to create intelligent and beautiful documentation.
Testing tools
See A Survey of Software Testing Tools for Computational Science by L.S. Chin, D.J. Worth and C. Greenough.
- CUnit: Unit testing framework for C.
- gcov: A test coverage program. See ggcov for a GUI replacement of gcov.
Profiling & debugging tools
- DDD: Graphical front-end for command-line debuggers such as GDB, etc.
- GDB: The GNU Project debugger.
- google-perftools: Fast, multi-threaded malloc() and nifty performance analysis tools.
- gprof: The GNU profiler. For a tutorial on this tool, see Profiling Tutorial: A simple program by DJ Worth, LS Chin, and C Greenough.
- OProfile: Profiler for Linux systems, capable of profiling all running code at low overhead.
- RATS: Rough Auditing Tool for Security.
- Solaris Studio: Formerly Sun Studio, but is now called Oracle Solaris Studio.
- Valgrind: Instrumentation framework for building dynamic analysis tools.
