[vtk-developers] Checking SMP backend at runtime/compiletime?

[Sean McBride]

On Tue, 9 Feb 2016 10:46:44 -0500, Sujin Philip said:

>vtkSMPTools is a framework for implementing multi-threaded algorithms in
>VTK. It support several backends. The main ones are TBB and OpenMP. There
>are Kaapi and Simple backends which are no longer supported and will be
>removed soon.

And this stuff is in Common/Core/SMP?  The "Simple" one seems to be based on vtkMultiThreader and thus pthreads (on unix), correct?

I've only done a quick grep, but I don't see anything in there about the "Simple" one being deprecated.

>Finally, the default backend is Sequential which is just a
>single threaded implementation of the framework. After removal of the Kaapi
>and Simple backend, if you need multithreading support on Clang you would
>have to use TBB. The Sequential backend will be supported on all platforms.

Is TBB included in VTK?  It doesn't seem to to be.  It seems to me that removing the Simple backend would mean that you'd remove a whole bunch of multithreading when building a default build with the default compiler on OS X.  That seems horrible.  But hopefully I'm misunderstanding things here...

Have you thought about using std::thread, std::mutex and the like?

Cheers,

-- 
____________________________________________________________
Sean McBride, B. Eng                 sean at rogue-research.com
Rogue Research                        www.rogue-research.com 
Mac Software Developer              Montréal, Québec, Canada