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Query backend versions #1563

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franzpoeschel opened this issue Dec 1, 2023 · 1 comment
Open

Query backend versions #1563

franzpoeschel opened this issue Dec 1, 2023 · 1 comment

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@franzpoeschel
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Is your feature request related to a problem? If so, please describe.

Downstream applications might need to guard against bugs in e.g. ADIOS2 or HDF5. This is currently difficult, since it requires including backend-specific headers.

Describe the solution you'd like
Since backend versions can be changed in openPMD-api's design without an ABI change, this should ideally be runtime call.

We already have the following in version.hpp:

/** Return the feature variants of the openPMD-api library (run-time)
 *
 * @return std::map< std::string, bool > with variants such as backends
 */
std::map<std::string, bool> getVariants();

This cannot be extended to include version information without breaking API, but an additional call could help:

struct backend_information
{
     std::string version;
};

std::map<std::string, backend_information> getVariantsDetailed();

Describe alternatives you've considered

  1. Using #define macros: Would require including backend headers into public headers, which goes against our project structure and would make the ABI of user code depend on the available backends. Currently, installing a new version of e.g. ADIOS2 only requires relinking downstream applications.
  2. Fetching this information manually in downstream applications: Requires interacting with the backend libraries instead of going via openPMD-api.

Additional context
Required for implementing the open TODO in ComputationalRadiationPhysics/picongpu#4759

@ax3l
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ax3l commented Jan 28, 2025

That is great. We should even expose the version we compiled against and, if available, also the version we found at runtime. Let's start with compile-time versions we found though, we might not find runtime APIs for every dependency (we could check and report where we would like some).

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