Software tools and frameworks in High Energy Physics

In many fields of science and industry the computing environment has grown at an exponential speed in the past 30 years. From ad hoc solutions for each problem, the field has evolved gradually to use or reuse systems developed across the years for the same environment or coming from other fields with the same requirements. Several frameworks have emerged to solve common problems. In High Energy Physics (HEP) and Nuclear Physics, we have witnessed the emergence of common tools, packages and libraries that have become gradually the corner stone of the computing in these fields. The emergence of these systems has been complex because the computing field is evolving rapidly, the problems to be solved more and more complex and the size of the experiments now involving several thousand physicists from all over the world. This paper describes the emergence of these frameworks and their evolution from libraries including independent subroutines to task-oriented packages and to general experiments frameworks.