using agg (antigrain) library and getting gsl shell working - macos

My main aim is to get the GSL Shell working on my OSX 10.7 system. So far I have the correct version of lua with the correct patches running. I also have a working version of GSL which compiles and runs example programs. I can build agg perfectly and also run their example programs by running make in the macosx_sdl folder.
My first question is how on earth do I create my own project with agg? I know that you are supposed to simply add the files to your project file and go, but this does not seem to want to compile for me. Is it simply a case of adding the include directory and the libagg.a?
Finally, how do I build gsl shell? Currently it complains about the agg-plot folder a lot, so where do I put the agg files to make this build, then when i've done it where do I place the agg files so that the lua scripts can get to them?!
Hope someone can help!

In general to use the AGG library you need to make sure that the compiler is able to find the headers files and, during the linking, the libraries, either in form of a static or dynamic libraries.
To make the headers files and the libraries available you need to take into account the system that is used to build the software. If a traditional makefile sistem is used you need to add some flags to make sure that the headers file can be found. This can be achieved by adding into the makefile something like:
CFLAGS += -I/path/to/agg/headers
and for the linker:
LIBS += -L/path/to/agg/library -lagg -lm
In the specific case of GSL Shell 1.1 the file "make-packages" is used in the Makefile to configure the required packages. You can add here the flags required to locate the AGG library:
AGG_INCLUDES = -I/usr/include/agg2
AGG_LIBS = -lagg -lX11 -lpthread -lsupc++
you should just modify the path provided with the "-I" option and, in AGG_LIBS, add an option "-L/path/to/agg/library" to specify the path where the AGG libraries are located.
Please note also that the agg libraries depends on other libraries. For example on linux it needs at least the X11 library. The libraries supc++ may be needed if the linking is made by invoking gcc instead of g++ because if gcc is used the C++ runtime libraries are not included.

Related

Building static Armadillo using OpenBLAS, ARPACK, LAPACK, and SuperLU

We have an HPC environment with multiple versions of most packages, causing us to have designed a home-rolled way to install packages in unique locations and use environment modules for programmers/researchers to be able to identify which library versions they are using when they build a program, run a program, or both. Is there a relatively painless way to be able to perform builds in this environment. In my case, we're using OpenBLAS, ARPACK, LAPACK and SuperLU when building armadillo. In my case, I'm shooting for armadillo-0.3.7. It would be real nice if the use of switches as was done in the ./configure and make days would work. But all I've found so far is CMake builds, and it appears to be pretty much non-trivial to do a build.
Oh yeah. And, by the way, there's a need for the output Armadillo library to be static.
Thanks in advance for your help. The initial question may be a little vague, but I can get as specific as you like. I just didn't want to write a novel for the initial question on this issue.
Tools exist nowadays to handle the complexity of the build of these scientific software. I would suggest you look at either Spack or EasyBuild. Such tool will help you to save a lot of time by automatically building all the required dependencies and also generating the modulefiles for your users to use the software built.
The CMakeList.txt file and other CMake-related files can be modified to meet your needs. The flags are defined on line 48+, for instance set(ARMA_USE_LAPACK false)
The variables related to the LAPACK library are then defined in the include(ARMA_FindLAPACK) on line 250. The flag in toggled on on line 347 if lapack is found.
The customized path where LAPACK is located can be specified in the file cmake_aux/ARMA_FindLAPACK.cmake. If your customized path is stored as an environment variable as export PATHLAPACKLIB=/usr/lib/openblas-base, you can use it in the ARMA_FindLAPACK.cmake file by modifying line 11 ( see How to retrieve a user environment variable in CMake (Windows) and FIND_LIBRARY()):
message("Searching Lapack in $ENV{PATHLAPACKLIB}")
FIND_LIBRARY(LAPACK_LIBRARY
NAMES ${LAPACK_NAMES}
HINTS $ENV{PATHLAPACKLIB}
NO_DEFAULT_PATH
)
It is not a beautiful modification of the CMakefile, because it makes it not portable as its outcome depends on an environment variable. But, it you intend to to build and install Armadillo once for all, it works. Remember to delete the CMakeCache.txt file every time you modify a CMakeFile.txt, otherwise it keeps some trace of previous runs of cmake . and it looks as though the modification is consequenceless.
To make the library static, add the keyword static to the command add_library() on line 514 of CMakeFile.txt, as shown in CMake - Creating a static library :
add_library( armadillo STATIC ...)
Running cmake . and then make creates a small armadillo.a file, since most of the source consists in cpp headers.
Finally, the exemple1 is compiled as :
g++ -O2 -std=c++11 example1.cpp -o example1 -larmadillo -L/home/...../softs/armadillo-9.800.3/armadillo-9.800.3 -I/home/...../softs/armadillo-9.800.3/armadillo-9.800.3/include -lopenblas

GCC built from source in different location is incorrectly using same shared libs as native GCC

I'm a student doing research involving extending the TM capabilities of gcc. My goal is to make changes to gcc source, build gcc from the modified source, and, use the new executable the same way I'd use my distro's vanilla gcc.
I built and installed gcc in a different location (not /usr/bin/gcc), specifically because the modified gcc will be unstable, and because our project goal is to compare transactional programs compiled with the two different versions.
Our changes to gcc source impact both /gcc and /libitm. This means we are making a change to libitm.so, one of the shared libraries that get built.
My expectation:
when compiling myprogram.cpp with /usr/bin/g++, the version of libitm.so that will get linked should be the one that came with my distro;
when compiling it with ~/project/install-dir/bin/g++, the version of libitm.so that will get linked should be the one that just got built when I built my modified gcc.
But in reality it seems both native gcc and mine are using the same libitm, /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libitm.so.1.
I only have a rough grasp of gcc internals as they apply to our project, but this is my understanding:
Our changes tell one compiler pass to conditionally insert our own "function builtin" instead of one it would normally use, and this is / becomes a "symbol" which needs to link to libitm.
When I use the new gcc to compile my program, that pass detects those conditions and successfully inserts the symbol, but then at runtime my program gives a "relocation error" indicating the symbol is not defined in the file it is searching in: ./test: relocation error: ./test: symbol _ITM_S1RU4, version LIBITM_1.0 not defined in file libitm.so.1 with link time reference
readelf shows me that /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libitm.so.1 does not contain our new symbols while ~/project/install-dir/lib64/libitm.so.1 does; if I re-run my program after simply copying the latter libitm over the former (backing it up first, of course), it does not produce the relocation error anymore. But naturally this is not a permanent solution.
So I want the gcc I built to use the shared libs that were built along with it when linking. And I don't want to have to tell it where they are every time - my feeling is that it should know where to look for them since I deliberately built it somewhere else to behave differently.
This sounds like the kind of problem any amateur gcc developer would have when trying to make a dev environment and still be able to use both versions of gcc, but I had difficulty finding similar questions. I am thinking this is a matter of lacking certain config options when I configure gcc before building it. What is the right configuration to do this?
My small understanding of the instructions for building and installing gcc led me to do the following:
cd ~/project/
mkdir objdir
cd objdir
../source-dir/configure --enable-languages=c,c++ --prefix=/home/myusername/project/install-dir
make -j2
make install
I only have those config options because they seemed like the ones closest related to "only building the parts I need" and "not overwriting native gcc", but I could be wrong. After the initial config step I just re-run make -j2 and make install every time I change the code. All these steps do complete without errors, and they produce the ~/project/install-dir/bin/ folder, containing the gcc and g++ which behave as described.
I use ~/project/install-dir/bin/g++ -fgnu-tm -o myprogram myprogram.cpp to compile a transactional program, possibly with other options for programs with threads.
(I am using Xubuntu 16.04.3 (64 bit), within VirtualBox on Windows. The installed /usr/bin/gcc is version 5.4.0. Our source at ~/project/source-dir/ is a modified version of 5.3.0.)
You’re running into build- versus run-time linking differences. When you build with -fgnu-tm, the compiler knows where the library it needs is found, and it tells the linker where to find it; you can see this by adding -v to your g++ command. However when you run the resulting program, the dynamic linker doesn’t know it should look somewhere special for the ITM library, so it uses the default library in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu.
Things get even more confusing with ITM on Ubuntu because the library is installed system-wide, but the link script is installed in a GCC-private directory. This doesn’t happen with the default GCC build, so your own GCC build doesn’t do this, and you’ll see libitm.so in ~/project/install-dir/lib64.
To fix this at run-time, you need to tell the dynamic linker where to find the right library. You can do this either by setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH (to /home/.../project/install-dir/lib64), or by storing the path in the binary using -Wl,-rpath=/home/.../project/install-dir/lib64 when you build it.

How to use SDL2 with Qt Creator - Windows

I was struggling with using SDL2 and Qt Creator and found some threads here on SO that were mostly helpful but nothing that put it all together for SDL2 and Qt Creator on Windows 10. The main issue was that I could not use the console for I/O at the same time as SDL2 and following the other recommendations, a number of different things went wrong.
There were two keys:
Which SDL2.dll file to use and which directory to place it.
Some said use the SDL2.dll file download from the SDL website. Others said put this file in the main project directory, which did not work for me. What worked for me was first doing a build of my project (which failed) but creates a "build-..." directory. Then, taking the SDL2.dll file from installDir\SDL2-2.0.5\i686-w64-mingw32\bin and placing it in the "build-..." directory.
In the project.pro file, adding manually:
INCLUDEPATH += installDir/SDL2-2.0.5/i686-w64-mingw32/include
LIBS += -L installDir/SDL2-2.0.5/i686-w64-mingw32/lib -lmingw32 -mwindows -mconsole -lSDL2main -lSDL2
CXXFLAGS = -std=c++11
To be honest, I don't know if all of the calls in LIBS are needed, but it's now working perfectly for me and I thought I'd share some knowledge.
Where to put the DLL
The dll, is required to be in a directory which match one of the following rules:
Is part of the $PATH$ environment variable
Is in the same directory than the executable
Is in a directory which is actively specified in your code and loaded "manually".
In my case, I just moved those DLL to my /bin folder.
Libs and includes
Includes are required for the compiler, for this purpose, both of the following possibilities match:
Copy the SDL includes in the compiler include directory.
Add the include path to the project using INCLUDEPATH as explained by #launchpadmcquack.
Libs are required by the linker, for this purpose, both of the following possibilities match:
Copy the SDL libs in the compiler lib directory.
Add the lib to the project using LIBS as explained in the question.
Considering the library list, SDL2 is required, others depends on you specific projects. E.g. In my case I do not link any of the mingw32, mwindows or mconsole.
Additional note: You may specify C++11 with the CONFIG parameter:
CONFIG *= c++11

Building a Shared Library but linking against a Static One

I have an Autogen Makefile.am that I'm trying to use to build a test program for a shared library. To build my test binary, I want to continue building the shared library as target but I want the test program to be linked statically. I've spent the last few hours trying to craft my Makefile.am to get it to do this.
I've tried explicitly changing the LDADD line to use the .a version of the library and get a file not found error even though I can see this library is getting built.
I try to add the .libs directory to my link path via LDFLAGS and still it can't find it.
I tried moving my library sources to my test SOURCES list and this won't work because executable object files are built differently than those for static libraries.
I even tried replicating a lib_LIBRARIES entry for the .a version (so there's both a lib_LTLIBRARIES and a lib_LIBRARIES) and replicate all the LDFLAGS, SOURCES, dir and HEADERS for the shared version as part of the static version (replacing la with a of the form _a_SOURCES = _la_SOURCES. Still that doesn't work because now it can't figure out what to build.
My configure.ac file is using the default LT_INIT which should give me both static and dynamic libraries and as I said it is apprently building both even if the libtool can't see the .a file.
Please, anyone know how to do this?
As #Brett Hale mentions in his comment, you should tell Makefile.am that you want the program to be statically linked.
To achieve this you must append -static to your LDFLAGS.
Changing the LDFLAGS for a specific binary is achieved by changing binary_LDFLAGS (where binary is the name of the binary you want to build).
so something like this should do the trick:
binary_LDFLAGS = $(AM_LDFLAGS) -static

Use headers and libraries from different folders

I have two GTK builds on my Mac, an X11 one with headers and a Quartz one without. I can compile Vala code for X11 just fine, but how do I use the Quartz libraries?
This is probably a C question, but I only ever used that toolchain through valac.
When using valac, it gets the appropriate compile and link flags from pkg-config based on the --pkg flags. You can see what is being included with pkg-config --cflags --libs gtk+-2.0. If you wish to change this you have two opions:
Use valac -C to only produce C files and manage the compilation and linking yourself.
Set export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/lib/pkgconfig:/sw/lib/pkgconfig or whatever collection of directories to get your packages coming in the desired order.
I'm not quite sure where your GTK+ installs are located, presumably in a MacPorts tree.

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