Added blog post on superbuilds for ROOT

Author: Pavlo Svirin

_posts/2024-05-31-superbuilds-for-root.md

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+---
+title: "Superbuilds for ROOT"
+layout: post
+excerpt: "A GSoC 2024 project with goal to split ROOT into separate components and thus speed up its compilation"
+sitemap: false
+author: Pavlo Svirin
+permalink: blogs/gsoc24_pavlo_svirin_introduction_blog/
+date: 2024-05-31
+tags: gsoc root cmake 
+---
+
+### Introduction
+
+I am Pavlo Svirin, a software engineer at the Bogolyubov Institute of
+Theoretical Physics in Kyiv, Ukraine. During the Google Summer of Code 2024 I
+will be working on superbuilds for ROOT.
+
+**Mentors**: Vassil Vassilev, Danilo Piparo
+
+
+### Briefly about ROOT
+
+ROOT is a framework for data processing, born at CERN, at the heart of the
+research on high-energy, molecular and laser physics, as well as in  astronomy.
+Every day, thousands of physicists use ROOT applications to analyze their data
+or to perform simulations. 
+
+ROOT has plenty of built-in components which allow to do:
+- Histogramming and graphing to view and analyze distributions and functions,
+- curve fitting (regression analysis) and minimization of functionals,
+- statistics tools used for data analysis,
+- matrix algebra,
+- four-vector computations, as used in high energy physics,
+- standard mathematical functions,
+- multivariate data analysis, e.g. using neural networks,
+- image manipulation, used, for instance, to analyze astronomical pictures,
+- access to distributed data (in the context of the Grid),
+- distributed computing, to parallelize data analyses,
+- persistence and serialization of objects, which can cope with changes in class
+  definitions of persistent data,
+- access to databases,
+- 3D visualizations (geometry),
+- creating files in various graphics formats, like PDF, PostScript, PNG, SVG,
+  LaTeX, etc.
+- interfacing Python code in both directions,
+- interfacing Monte Carlo event generators.
+
+
+Because of such a variety of  features, ROOT is a very large software which
+takes a very long time to compile. Currently ROOT compiles all of the components
+available within the source code distribution.
+
+
+### Implementation Details and Plans
+
+The goal of the project is to speed up the compilation process by letting users
+specify which components of the ROOT will be needed. This can be done by
+converting ROOT’s CMake configuration into a set of “CMake External Projects”
+(superbuilds).  Superbuilds can remove all of this cruft from the project’s
+source repository, and enable you to more directly use the upstream project’s
+build system as an independently built software component. It is basically a
+simple package manager that you make consistently work across your target build
+platforms, and if your target platforms have a common package manager you might
+consider using that instead. 
+
+Also, during the configuration process it could be possible to identify if ROOT
+is already installed in the destination folder, the components which are already
+installed and offer an option to skip their compilation and use these already
+installed components for current compilation.
+
+
+### Conclusion
+
+The goal of this project is not to change the build system of ROOT, but to
+optimize it and offer users an option to select only  the parts of the ROOT to
+be built. Partial  builds for ROOT can allow the creation of “edition” builds if
+necessary. There is also an option to create an Ncurses menu-based configuration
+application (TUI, text user interface) which will simplify the configuration
+process and will let users not to remember names of ROOT subprojects, thus
+making build process easier.
+
+
+### Related Links
+
+- [ROOT website](https://root.cern)
+- [CMake Superbuilds and Git Submodules](https://www.kitware.com/cmake-superbuilds-git-submodules/)
+- [CMake external projects documentation](https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/module/ExternalProject.html)
+- [My GitHub Profile](https://github.com/pavlo-svirin)
+
+