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NimLAPACK

Nim bindings for the LAPACK libraries.

These are low-level bindings generated via c2nim. See nimlapack.html for the API documentation.

For a higher-level linear algebra library based on this, check out neo.

Linking LAPACK implementations

The library requires to link some LAPACK implementation to perform the actual linear algebra operations. By default, it tries to link whatever is the default system-wide LAPACK implementation.

You can link against a different LAPACK implementation by a combination of:

  • changing the path for linked libraries (use --clibdir for this).
  • using the --define:lapack flag. By default (i.e. if you don't set this flag), the system tries to load a LAPACK library by looking for the most common LAPACK library file names according to the underling operating system (e.g. lapack.dll, openblas.dll, libopenblas.dll, mkl_intel_lp64.dll in Windows or liblapack.so on Linux, etc). However, if you want to link to one specific library, such as, say, the library libopenblas.so.3 on Linux you should pass to Nim the option --define:lapack=openblas. Note the missing lib prefix and .so suffix, which nimlapack adds automatically (similarly on windows you should not include the .dll extension when setting this flag).

See the tasks inside nimblas.nimble for a few examples.

Packages for various LAPACK implementations are available from the package managers of many Linux distributions. On OSX one can add the brew formulas from Homebrew Science, such as brew install homebrew/science/openblas. On Windows you can download pre-built binaries from the OpenBLAS github repository and add the library folder to your PATH or copy it into your executable folder.

You may also need to add suitable paths for the includes and library dirs. On OSX, this should do the trick

switch("clibdir", "/usr/local/opt/openblas/lib")
switch("cincludes", "/usr/local/opt/openblas/include")