Getting started » Downloading and building » fckit

What is fckit?

fckit contains Fortran helper classes, many implemented by eckit in C++, that provides most notably following functionality to the Atlas Fortran interfaces

  • Configuration
    • YAML / JSON parser
  • Logging
    • Streams: Info / Warning / Error / Debug
  • Exceptions
  • MPI abstraction with both a Parallel (true MPI) and Serial implementation
  • Testing framework for Fortran (fctest)
  • Powerful Fortran preprocessor based on fypp

Downloading

fckit is officially maintained and available from its ECMWF github page.

The master branch tracks the latest stable release, whereas the develop branch tracks the latest developments.

To download the project at the latest release we can type on the terminal the commands reported below:

git clone -b master https://github.com/ecmwf/fckit.git

Installing

The fckit build system is based on CMake which tries to automatically detect compilers and project dependencies. To avoid suprises make sure that the following environment variables are pointing to the correct compiler.

  • CC – Path to C compiler
  • CXX – Path to C++ compiler
  • Fortran – Path to Fortran compiler

Other environment variables which may help CMake (version greater than 3.12) in finding useful dependencies for Atlas:

  • ecbuild_ROOT – Path to ecbuild install prefix
  • eckit_ROOT – Path to eckit install prefix

fckit can be configured and installed as follows, to a given path-to-install as shown below:

cd fckit
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ../ -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=<path-to-install>
make install

If Atlas is the only reason to install fckit, it is OK to have several (undocumented) features disabled. It is then safe to add following to the arguments to the cmake configuration above:

-DENABLE_TESTS=OFF