This section is dedicated to illustrate and justify some of the options used and fixed by default in the compilation of the Geant4 toolkit. It is also meant to be a simple guide for the user/installer to avoid or overcome problems which may occur on some compilers. Solutions proposed here are based on the experience gained while porting the Geant4 code to different architectures/compilers and are specific to the OS's and compiler's version valid at the current time of writing of this manual.
It's well known that each compiler adopts its own internal techniques to produce the object code, which in the end might be more or less perfomant and more or less optimised, depending on several factors also related to the system architecture which it applies to.
After the installation of the libraries, we strongly suggest to always distinguish between the installation directory (identified by $G4INSTALL) and the working directory (identified by $G4WORKDIR), in order not to alter the installation area.
OS: Linux
Compiler: GNU/gcc
Strict ISO/ANSI compilation is forced (-ansi -pedantic
compiler flags), also code is compiled with high verbosity
diagnostics (-Wall
flag). The default optimisation level
is -O2
.
The CMake build mode RelWithDebInfo
allows for an
optimised build of the libraries but including debug symbols
(-O2 -g
flags on g++, flag G4OPTDEBUG
in the GNUMake system).
Additional compilation options (-march=XXX
-mfpmath=sseYYY
) to adopt chip specific floating-point
operations on the SSE unit, can be activated by adapting the
XXX, YYY
options to your chip and adding these
to the CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS
variable via
ccmake
or the CMake GUI (or by uncommenting the
relevant part in the Linux-g++.gmk
configuration
script for the GNUMake system).
By doing so, a greater stability of results has been verified,
making possible reproducibility of exact outputs between debug,
non-optimised and optimised runs. A little performance improvement
(in the order of 2%) can also be achieved in some cases. To be
considered that binaries built using these chip-specific options
will likely NOT be portable cross platforms; generated applications
will only run on the specific chip-based architectures.
OS: MS/Windows
Compiler: MS-VC++
Since version .NET 7.0 of the compiler, ISO/ANSI compliance is required.
See Section 3.1 of the Installation Guide for more detailed information. See also Section 7.1 for more tips.
OS: Darwin
Compiler: GNU/gcc
The setup adopted for the g++
compiler on Mac OS X
resembles in most parts the one for Linux systems.
The default optimisation level in this case is -O2
.
Dynamic libraries (.dylib
) are supported as well; once
built, in order to run the generated application, the user must
specify the absolute path in the system where they're installed
with the DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH
system variable.