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Welcome to the forge wiki!

Document Outline:

• Forge Dependencies
• Cloning Forge
• CMake Options of Forge
• OS Specific Build Steps
  • Windows
    • Prerequisites
    • Build Steps
    • Install Dependencies
  • Linux
    • Prerequisites
    • Install Dependencies
    • Build Steps
  • OSX
    • Prerequisites
    • Install Dependencies
    • Build Steps

Forge Dependencies

• GLFW or SDL2
• freetype
• boost - not a runtime dependency.
• FreeImage - (optional).
• fontconfig on Linux and OSX.
• Documentation Generation (preferred & recommended version of python is 3.*)
  • Doxygen
  • Sphinx with extensions: Breathe, recommonmark

Linux/Unix: Dependencies should be available via respective package managers. Windows: We recommend vcpkg.

Cloning Forge

$ git clone https://github.com/arrayfire/forge.git

CMake Options of Forge

CMake Options:

Options	Descrition	Default
BUILD_SHARED_LIBS	Build Shared Library	ON
CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE	Set build type	Release1
CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX	Location for install target	<path>
FG_BUILD_DOCS	Build documentation	ON 2
FG_BUILD_EXAMPLES	Build examples	ON 3
FG_RENDERING_BACKEND	Choice of Rendering backend	OpenGL 4
FG_USE_WINDOW_TOOLKIT	Choice of window toolkit	glfw3 5
FG_WITH_FREEIMAGE	Use Freeimage library	ON 6

• ¹ Defaults to Debug for cloned repository, Release otherwise.
• ² Turned ON if doxygen is found.
• ³ CPU examples are built always. CUDA & OpenCL examples are built if CUDA toolkit and OpenCL libraries are found.
• ⁴ Currently, only OpenGL available.
• ⁵ SDL2 is the only current alternative.
• ⁵ FreeImage support only turned ON if dev package is found.

OS Specific Build Steps

Windows

Prerequisites

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2017 or later
• CMake v3.5.1 and above
• vcpkg (latest version)

Build Steps

1. Configure

Dependency installation is also taken care of by the below cmake configure command.

cd forge
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -G "Visual Studio 16 2019" -A x64 \
  -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE="<vcpkg_dir>\scripts\buildsystems\vcpkg.cmake" \
  -DVCPKG_MANIFEST_DIR=..\vcpkg ..

If you are building the CUDA examples with Visual Studio 2017 (v15.5 and above), you will need to point to the v140(or later) toolset during the configuration step:

cmake -Tv140 -G "Visual Studio 15 2017 Win64" \
  -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE="<vcpkg_dir>\scripts\buildsystems\vcpkg.cmake" ..

Follow the instructions from here to install v140 toolset in Visual Studio 2017.

2. Build ArrayFire

Once Forge has been configured, you may build Forge by opening the build\Forge.sln file in Visual Studio.

Install Dependencies

With latest master, there is no need to install dependencies manually. However, in the case your workflow is setup in such fashion do keep note of the following points.

• Using freetype installed in vcpkg folder is sufficient for developement purposes. However, if the intention behind building forge is to create a custom package(using cpack), then we recommend using a static version of freetype that can be installed in vcpkg using the instructions from this page.
• As of writing this page, there is an issue with freetype (dynamic library version) provided by vcpkg when we do the following: freetype link-library(lib file) is installed instead of the dll file. Until this is fixed upstream, the above mentioned work around can be employed to correctly package forge usign cpack.

install(FILES $<TARGET_FILE:Freetype::Freetype> ...)

Linux

The instructions are based on Ubuntu 16.04. Change the packages and package manager to the distro of your choice.

Prerequisites

• Required: gcc (>=4.7), g++, git (>=1.8), make, cmake(v3.5.1 and above)
• Recommended: FreeImage (version 3), cmake-curses-gui

sudo apt-get install -y build-essential git cmake
sudo apt-get install -y cmake-curses-gui

Install Dependencies

sudo apt-get install -y libboost-all-dev libfontconfig1-dev libfreeimage-dev libglfw3-dev

Fontconfig package installs freetype as it's dependency.

Build Steps

cd /path/to/dir/forge
mkdir build && cd build && cmake ..
make -j8 # or number of threads of your choosing

The default installation prefix is /usr/local. That is, includes are installed to /usr/local/include, libs are installed to /usr/local/lib, and examples are installed to /usr/local/forge.

To change the install prefix use

cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/path/to/install/dir

NOTE: If the default gcc on your machine is gcc >= 6.1 and you will have to do the following to build CUDA examples.

For example on archlinux, you'd have to install gcc version suitable for CUDA compilation from the Arch repositories and then run the followinng commad.

cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/path/to/install/dir -DCUDA_HOST_COMPILER:FILEPATH=/usr/bin/g++-<compatible-version-number>

Then run make install (use sudo to install to system directories).

OSX

The instructions are based on OSX 10.9 or later.

Prerequisites

• Required: cmake(v3.5.1 and above)

brew install cmake

Install Dependencies

brew install boost fontconfig freeimage glfw3

Build Steps

cd /path/to/dir/forge
mkdir build && cd build && cmake ..
make -j8 # or number of threads of your choosing

The default installation prefix is /usr/local. That is, includes are installed to /usr/local/include, libs are installed to /usr/local/lib, examples are installed to /usr/local/forge.

To change the install prefix use

cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/path/to/install/dir