SHEPHERD Design Guide

Language Choice

This is an area of active debate. Proposed languages are:

• Julia
• Fortran
• C
• C++
• Rust

Each has their own strengths and weaknesses that would be highly beneficial for ths project.

Selection criteria include:

• Ability to compile and deploy on remote (HPC) compute resources (all except Julia)
• Ability to write the fastest code (all)
• Ability to script and run models interactively (Julia)
• Interoperability with existing sparse linear algebra libraries (C, C++, Fortran)
  • Intel MKL
  • AOCL Sparse
• Wide user base and developer skill (all except Rust?)