Four Weeks in to the Second Half Report

We have finally merged in the C port of the Monte Carlo routines in to the main TARDIS repository and made it the default. All the final bugs were resolved and hopefully this will let us collect user feedback and gather any information about bugs that were introduced and performance improvements that were achieved. This more or less concludes the coding part of the GSoC and all that is left is to fix any remaining bugs, write documentation and react to users requests. Another potential area of issues is the difference between GCC and clang compilers. For example previously we had issues with clang treating inline keyword differently. Currently I am working on using TARDIS to fit synthetic spectra to observed supernova spectra using various optimization algorithms which also provides a good test for the implemented functionality.

Two Weeks in to the Second Half of GSoC

Since the bulk of the work is finished now I concentrated mainly on the boring, long and tedious bits. Enforcing structured programming and object-oriented techniques like encapsulation are some of the things I was doing. Also there are plans to start integrating the changes in to the main code base and help people implement their physics in to the new infrastructure. One interesting issue I currently have and was weirded out by is this:

I have this code in my fork:

  if (x_insert > x[imin] || x_insert < x[imax])

    {

      ret_val = TARDIS_ERROR_BOUNDS_ERROR;

      // Crashes without this exit, this doesn't make sense.

      exit(1);

    }

This logical branch never gets executed unless something goes terribly wrong. I checked that this branch is never run with the data I use. However, for some reason, if I comment out the exit(1) line the program crashes. It would be very interesting if someone was able to shed some light here or at least give a lead. Other than that I cannot pin point any road blocks. Except maybe that due to the tedious nature of current tasks (mostly maintenance and code improvement with no noticeable immediate practical effect) the enthusiasm is winding down quite a bit.