Is it possible to call a library from a different version of OF?
 

Dear All,

This may sound weird to you, but the situation is that we have invested a lot to develop a solver based on an old version of OF. Now we want to use some new features from latest OF, e.g., the new wall distance calculation.

Upgrading our solver to the latest OF version will be very time consuming and we are super lazy. :D

So here is what we want to do: In our solver (OF24), call this new wallDist function (OF50) and return the wall distance field. Is it possible?

Ideally, if I can compile a completely standalone library from OF50 and call it from OF24, that will work. But as I know, it is hard to do that. Any ideas?

Thanks very much in advance!

Regards,
Jack

Have you tried copying the library (with adjusted Make/files and /options) and recompiling it? Without looking at it, maybe some adjustements have to be made, but i would guess you could follow the errors, wmake will give you :)

Thanks for the suggestion. But I am not quite sure how to do it. Are you suggesting me compile a OpenFOAM5.0 library using OpenFOAM240? That will probably not solve our problem. I DO need this library compiled by OpenFOAM5.0 since I may use multiple new features. Changing all of them to OpenFOAM240 "format" may need quite a lot time and I am not sure if they will all work out.

Jack.

Any ideas? Thanks!

Well, I would suggest you try it. I really cannot tell you how many differences there are or how much work it will be. But I cannot think of any method, which will be any less work.

Unless you are doing strange things, updating your solver will be less time consuming and is a worthy investment compared to back-porting the library.

Hi Anton,

Thanks for your reply. But yes, we are doing the strange thing...

The scenario is that our solver needs to call functions from more than two versions of OpenFOAM, developed by different groups of people.

Say, our solver is based on OF240, we need to call functions from OF-V1 (developed by group A), OF-V2 (developed by group B), OF-V3 (developed by group C). All these groups implemented a lot of their own stuff, so it is impossible to just upgrade to one version while having all the functions we need.

Anyway, that is why we need a trick to call functions from different versions of OpenFOAM.

Thanks,
Jack

Any ideas? Thanks. Jack.