Bamboo Shoot 3 is designed for data persistence in PandaX without dependency on ROOT.
At PandaX Dark Matter Experiment we have used ROOT 5 from CERN for storing part of our data, but we have encountered data format and ABI incompatibilities between patch versions of ROOT. ABI incompatibilities triggered runtime errors, where they could have been link-time errors that can also be reported on program startup; data format incompatibility is more annoying. To eliminate these problems we implemented the third generation of Bamboo Shoot from grounds up without dependency on ROOT.
This library is in 3 parts: object serialization library, named pbss; file
IO library, named pbsf; and support utilities, named pbsu. They live in
namespace pbss, pbsf and pbsu.
The serialization library has an open data format which will stay unchanged throughout the lifetime of this third generation; also it is planned to have implementations in multiple languages, currently only in C++. It supports tree-like data structures, and provides forward/backward-compatibility on fields of custom structs by numerically tagging each field. The implementation currently runs at several gigabytes per second in both serializing and parsing. Documentation at doc/pbss.md.
The file IO library also has a stable data format, providing simple sequential access and rudimentary support for random access. The two parts are built around the assumptions that a single stored object can be large (typically 100kB~10MB), and sequential access is the primary access pattern. Documentation at doc/pbsf.md.
The utilities library provides some simple utilities following functional style, documented in doc/utils.md.
GCC >=5.0 or clang >=3.5 is required to compile the main code, and cmake are required to build everything. x86_64 GNU/Linux is the primary supported platform, but it should work on OS X too.
Building from source can be done by
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=<see below> /path/to/source
make install
If the installation is intended for local use only, Native build type is
recommended; other options are AVX_release for AVX-capable CPUs,
Release for general binary, or Debug for a debug build.
The library code is clean to
-Wall -Wpedantic -Wextra -Wconversion -Werror.
The whole library can be included by #include <bs3/pbs.hh>, and links to
a single library libpbsf.a or libpbsf_s.so. Static linking is
recommended, which is what we do at PandaX.
This library uses integer versioning, with an "r" prefix, e.g. "r123", and pre-releases like "r123-pre", "r124-pre2". That "3" in "Bamboo Shoot 3" means "the third generation of Bamboo Shoot" and is not part of version number.
We tend to break ABI compatibility aggressively, especially in pbsu and
pbsf; but whenever an ABI-incompatible change is introduced, the ABI
version tag on inline namespaces will be bumped, also the soversion of
libpbsf_s.so if it is related to pbsf.
The library is licensed under GPLv3 or later, and documentation under CC0 (public domain).