[pgrouting-users] importance of -frounding-math compilation flag?

[Stephen Woodbridge]

On 3/16/2013 8:36 PM, William Kyngesburye wrote:
> On Mar 16, 2013, at 6:47 PM, Stephen Woodbridge wrote:
>
>> On 3/16/2013 6:20 PM, William Kyngesburye wrote:
>>> I'm recompiling pgrouting on OS X Lion, using the clang
>>> compiler. clang does not have the -frounding-math option.
>>>
>>> I found one reference that the clang equivalent is
>>> --disable-fpmath, but that just causes and error "unsupported
>>> option '--disable-fpmath'".  I could find no documentation that
>>> clang has or had this option, or something similar.
>>>
>>> Is the rounding behavior critical?
>>
>> I do not know for a fact one way or the other, But I'm guess that
>> this options probably is not critical for MOST pgrouting
>> functions.
>>
>> Where it MIGHT be important is for the CGAL library and/or GAUL
>> libraries. CGAL specifically does a lot of math. You might check
>> those packages so see what they do with respect to fp rounding on
>> OS X.
>>
>> If anyone knows more about this please correct this AND we should
>> document it somewhere for future reference.
>>
> I didn't need to recompile CGAL, so I didn't see a problem there.
> But I see that it also uses -frounding-math for GCC, but nothing for
> clang.  The changes log does say CGAL fully supports clang as of CGAL
> 4.1, so maybe rounding behavior is not an issue or the code works
> around it.
>
> All I could find in GAUL is a macro define for ROUND which looks like
> proper rounding towards 0.
>
> I found another reference, for CGAL and OSX/clang:
>
> http://jamesgregson.blogspot.com/2012/06/cgal-build-issues-under-os-x-107.html
>
>  I guess we're screwed, if the rounding behavior is important to
> compiler optimization in CGAL and pgRouting.  (the previous reference
> for the supposed --disable-fpmath option was from Fink.  Never liked
> Fink.)

OK, so CGAL is only used for building drive time polygons. The rest of 
pgRouting should work just fine. I am also considering removing CGAL in 
Rev 2.0 and using a much smaller and simpler code set that I have used 
in the past.

This rounding issue might be a more serious issue GEOS which is the 
underlying geometery library used in postGIS, so I wonder what they are 
doing about this.

-Steve

> ----- William Kyngesburye <kyngchaos*at*kyngchaos*dot*com>
> http://www.kyngchaos.com/
>
> "We are at war with them. Neither in hatred nor revenge and with no
> particular pleasure I shall kill every ___ I can until the war is
> over. That is my duty."
>
> "Don't you even hate 'em?"
>
> "What good would it do if I did? If all the many millions of people
> of the allied nations devoted an entire year exclusively to hating
> the ____ it wouldn't kill one ___ nor shorten the war one day."
>
> <Ha, ha> "And it might give 'em all stomach ulcers."
>
> - Tarzan, on war
>
> _______________________________________________ Pgrouting-users
> mailing list Pgrouting-users at lists.osgeo.org
> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/pgrouting-users
>