Go HEP release 0.15.0

DOI

Release v0.15.0 is fresh from the oven.

This new release dropped explicit support for Go-1.8.x but, in turn, gained support for Go-1.11.x and “Go Modules”. In a nutshell, Go modules allow to explicitly declare what are the dependencies a given module needs for the go build tool to successfully build it. And, more importantly, Go modules allow to explicitly declare what are the needed versions of these dependencies, essentially making a build completely reproducible.

You can find more informations about Go modules over there:

Currently, modules are only tested in Travis-CI, on the Go master branch. But as Go-1.12.x will get closer and modules get more ubiquitous, we’ll gradually switch to “Go modules” being the mainstream way to build Go-HEP.

Do not hesitate to report any issues you encounter when building with GO111MODULE=on enabled.

rootio

Another big news for the v0.15.0 release is the support for writing ROOT files:

  • writing TObjStrings, TH1x, TH2x, TGraph, TGraph{,Assymm}Errors is in,
  • support for writing compressed ROOT files as well (including lz4, lzma and zlib)
  • 2 new ROOT-related commands:
    • cmd/yoda2root: a command to convert YODA files into ROOT ones (so: histograms and scatters)
    • rootio/cmd/root-cp: a command to extract objects from a ROOT file into a new ROOT file

To support writing TH1x, TH2x and TGraphs, hbook types have been modified to export most of their fields – so one can create a rootio.H1D from a hbook.H1D. This enabled hbook/rootcnv to gain 3 new functions:

  • rootcnv.FromH1D: a function that converts an hbook.H1D into a rootio.H1D, loosing a bit of informations along the way (ROOT isn’t as precise as hbook or YODA are)
  • rootcnv.FromH2D: a function that converts hbook.H2Ds into rootio.H2Ds,
  • rootcnv.FromS2D: a function that converts hbook.S2D into rootio.TGraphAsymmErrors.

rootio & xrootd

Finally, we have received 2 patches from Paul Seyfert (a.k.a pseyfert), our first “CERNois” committer :). Paul enhanced the UI of root-ls and xrd-ls to better deal with nested directories (and how they are displayed) in both of these commands. Thanks Paul!

Examples

Without further ado, here is how you would create a ROOT file, with lz4 compression, containing a TObjString:

func main() {
	w, err := rootio.Create("out.root", rootio.WithLZ4(flate.BestCompression))
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatal(err)
	}
	defer w.Close()

	var (
		k = "my-objstring"
		v = rootio.NewObjString("Hello World from Go-HEP!")
	)

	err = w.Put(k, v)
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatal(err)
	}

	fmt.Printf("wkeys: %d\n", len(w.Keys()))

	err = w.Close()
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatalf("could not close file: %v", err)
	}
}

and here is how you would use root-cp:

$> root-cp -h
Usage: root-cp [options] file1.root [file2.root [...]] out.root

ex:
 $> root-cp f.root out.root
 $> root-cp f1.root f2.root f3.root out.root
 $> root-cp f1.root:hist.* f2.root:h2 out.root

options:

$> root-cp ./testdata/graphs.root:g.* out.root
$> root-cp root://xrootd.example.org/file.root:hist.* out.root

More ROOT files writing examples can be found here:

AOB

We will try to have preliminary support for writing TTrees in the next release. That should be fun.

Interoperability with Apache Arrow Arrays is still on the table. It might even prove to be easier to support Apache Arrow first and then implement TTrees writing support on top of that. We will see…

Stay tuned! (and, as always, any kind of help (reviews, patches, nice emails, constructive criticism) deeply appreciated.)