Building, testing and installing

Quick start

Building FLINT requires:

On a typical Linux or Unix-like system where Autotools is available (see below for instructions using CMake), FLINT can be built and installed as follows:

./bootstrap.sh
./configure --disable-static
make -j
make install

We also recommend that you run make check before installing.

For a complete list of build settings, write

./configure --help

An example of a custom configuration command would be

./configure                                         \
    --enable-assert                                 \
    --enable-avx2                                   \
    --disable-static                                \
    --with-gmp-include=/home/user1/builds/includes/ \
    --with-gmp-lib=/home/user1/builds/lib/          \
    --with-mpfr=/usr                                \
    --prefix=/home/user1/installations/             \
    CC=clang                                        \
    CFLAGS="-Wall -O3 -march=alderlake"

Library and install paths

If you intend to install the FLINT library and header files, you can specify where they should be placed by passing --prefix=path to configure, where path is the directory under which the lib and include directories exist into which you wish to place the FLINT files when it is installed.

If GMP and MPFR are not installed in the default search path of your compiler (e.g. /usr/include/ and /usr/lib/), you must specify where they are by passing their location to configure --with-gmp=ABSOLUTE_PATH for GMP and --with-mpfr=ABSOLUTE_PATH for MPFR. Note that the FLINT build system can handle GMP and MPFR as installed at some location and as source builds (built from source but not installed). Though, to run the FLINT tests, GMP and MPFR needs to be properly installed.

Testing FLINT

The full FLINT test suite can be run using

make check

or in parallel on a multicore system using

make -j check

Number of test iterations

The number of test iterations can be changed with the FLINT_TEST_MULTIPLIER environment variable. For example, the following will only run 10% of the default iterations:

export FLINT_TEST_MULTIPLIER=0.1
make check

Conversely, FLINT_TEST_MULTIPLIER=10 will stress test FLINT by performing 10x the default number of iterations.

Testing single modules

If you wish to simply check a single module of FLINT you can pass the option MOD=modname to make check. You can also pass a list of module names:

make check MOD=ulong_extras
make check MOD="fft fmpz_mat"

Test coverage

To obtain coverage statistics for the FLINT test suite, assuming that gcov and lcov are installed, configure FLINT with --enable-coverage. Then run:

make -j check
make coverage

This will place a coverage report in build/coverage.

Static or dynamic library only

FLINT builds static and shared libraries by default, except on platforms where this is not supported. If you do not require either a shared or static library then you may pass --disable-static or --disable-shared to configure. This can substantially speed up the build.

AVX2 instructions

On x86-64 machines with AVX2 support, compiling FLINT with the --enable-avx2 option can improve performance substantially, notably by enabling the small-prime FFT. Currently this option is not enabled by default.

TLS, reentrancy and single mode

FLINT uses thread local storage by default (--enable-tls). However, if reentrancy is required on systems that do not support this, one can pass --disable-tls and mutexes will be used instead (requires POSIX). As most modern systems support thread local storage, it is not recommended to build FLINT without TLS.

There are two modes in which FLINT may installed: the default single mode, which is faster, but makes use of thread local storage for its memory manager and to handle threading, and a slower but less complicated reentrant mode. The later is useful when debugging a program where tracing allocations is important.

If you wish to select the single mode, pass the --single option to configure, though note that this is the default. The reentrant mode is selected by passing the option --reentrant to configure.

ABI and architecture support

On some systems, e.g. Sparc and some Macs, more than one ABI is available. FLINT chooses the ABI based on the CPU type available, however its default choice can be overridden by passing either ABI=64 or ABI=32 to configure.

To build on MinGW64 it is necessary to pass ABI=64 to configure, as FLINT is otherwise unable to distinguish it from MinGW32.

In some cases, it is necessary to override the CPU/OS defaults. This can be done by passing --build=cpu-os to configure.

The available choices for CPU include x86_64, x86, ia64, sparc, sparc64, ppc, ppc64. Other CPU types are unrecognised and FLINT will build with generic code on those machines.

The choices for OS include Linux, MINGW32, MINGW64, CYGWIN32, CYGWIN64, Darwin, FreeBSD, SunOS and numerous other operating systems.

It is also possible to override the default CC, AR and CFLAGS used by FLINT by passing CC=full_path_to_compiler, etc., to FLINT’s configure.

CMake build

If you wish to install FLINT with CMake, simply type:

mkdir build && cd build
cmake .. -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON
cmake --build . --target install

Uninstalling FLINT

To uninstall FLINT with GNU make, type:

make uninstall

Now to use FLINT, simply include the appropriate header files for the FLINT modules you wish to use in your C program. Then compile your program, linking against the FLINT library, GMP/MPIR, MPFR and pthreads with the options -lflint -lmpfr -lgmp -lpthread.

To clean up the local build files, use:

make clean
make distclean

Assertion checking

FLINT has an assert system. If you want a debug build you can pass --enable-assert to configure. However, this will slow FLINT considerably, so asserts should not be enabled (--disable-assert, the default) for deployment.

Linking and running code

Here is an example program to get started using FLINT:

#include "flint/flint.h"
#include "flint/arb.h"

int main()
{
    arb_t x;
    arb_init(x);
    arb_const_pi(x, 50 * 3.33);
    arb_printn(x, 50, 0); flint_printf("\n");
    flint_printf("Computed with FLINT-%s\n", flint_version);
    arb_clear(x);
}

Compile it with:

gcc test.c -lflint

You may also have to pass the flags -lmpfr and -lgmp to the compiler. If the FLINT header and library files are not in a standard location such as /usr/local, you may also have to provide flags such as:

-I/path/to/flint -L/path/to/flint

Finally, to run the program, make sure that the linker can find libflint. If it is installed in a nonstandard location, you can for example add this path to the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable.

The output of the example program should be something like the following:

[3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751 +/- 4.43e-50]
Computed with flint-3.0.0

Header file conflicts

If you have any difficulties with conflicts with system headers on your machine, you can do the following in your code:

#undef ulong
#define ulong ulongxx
#include <stdio.h>
// other system headers
#undef ulong
#define ulong mp_limb_t

This prevents FLINT’s definition of ulong interfering with your system headers.