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[RF] Remove the legacy evaluation backend - #23265

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@guitargeek

@guitargeek guitargeek commented Sep 5, 2026 •

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This is meant to be merged only in the 6.44 development cycle, i.e. after branching v6-42-00-patches in October, following a deprecation that will be done in 6.42

The PR is already opened now so we can check possible blind spots with the new evaluation backends.

@guitargeek guitargeek self-assigned this Sep 5, 2026
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Test Results

    24 files      24 suites   4d 2h 40m 20s ⏱️
 3 883 tests  3 883 ✅ 0 💤 0 ❌
83 160 runs  83 160 ✅ 0 💤 0 ❌

Results for commit 554e8c1.

♻️ This comment has been updated with latest results.

@guitargeek
guitargeek force-pushed the remove-legacy-eval-backend branch 3 times, most recently from 7820e08 to 0075fa0 Compare September 10, 2026 16:49
@guitargeek
guitargeek force-pushed the remove-legacy-eval-backend branch from 0075fa0 to 5dd456a Compare September 14, 2026 19:28
Remove the legacy evaluation backend for likelihood and chi-square fits.
It was superseded by the vectorized "cpu" backend, which is the default
since ROOT 6.32. After the removal of the constant term optimization,
the legacy backend also had no performance-relevant feature left that
would justify its continued maintenance.

Concretely, this means:

  * RooFit::EvalBackend::Legacy() and the corresponding enum value are
    removed. Passing RooFit::EvalBackend("legacy") to fitTo(),
    createNLL(), chi2FitTo() or createChi2() now throws an exception,
    and so does the deprecated RooFit::BatchMode("off").

  * The implementation classes of the legacy test statistics are
    removed: RooNLLVar, RooChi2Var, RooAbsOptTestStatistic and
    RooAbsTestStatistic.

  * The old multiprocessing mechanism of the legacy backend is removed
    as well, consisting of the RooRealMPFE class and the underlying
    BidirMMapPipe. The RooFit::NumCPU() command argument no longer
    forks off worker processes: it only selects the number of threads
    for the multi-threaded batch evaluation in RooBatchCompute, and its
    interleaving strategy argument is ignored. RooFit::Parallelize()
    based on RooFit::MultiProcess remains the multi-process
    alternative.

  * The nll::name[pdf,data] and chi2::name[pdf,data] expressions in the
    RooWorkspace::factory() language are removed, since they
    instantiated the removed classes directly.

  * RooFit::TestStatistics::RooUnbinnedL now always evaluates with the
    RooFit::Evaluator, and its evalBackend constructor parameter
    defaults to the "cpu" backend, like the NLLFactory.

  * The roofit_legacy_eval_backend CMake option is gone, and the
    xroofit package is now built unconditionally on non-MSVC platforms.

The tests that cross-checked the new backends against the legacy one
either compare against the "cpu" backend as the reference now (the chi2
cross-checks, which also probe for a usable CUDA device instead of
failing wholesale on machines without one), or are removed where their
only purpose was validating bit-by-bit agreement with the legacy
classes.

🤖 Done with the help of AI
The HS3 test suite has not updated its reference results to the new
evaluation backend yet.
@guitargeek
guitargeek force-pushed the remove-legacy-eval-backend branch from 5dd456a to 554e8c1 Compare October 19, 2026 07:30

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