Once you have installed ArrayFire on your system, the next thing to do is set up your build system. On Linux, you can create ArrayFire projects using almost any editor, compiler, or build system. The only requirements are that you include the ArrayFire header directories and link with the ArrayFire library you intend to use i.e. CUDA, OpenCL, oneAPI, CPU, or Unified backends.

The big picture

On Linux, we recommend installing ArrayFire to /opt/arrayfire directory. The installer will populate files in the following sub-directories:

include/arrayfire.h         - Primary ArrayFire include file
include/af/*.h              - Additional include files
lib/libaf*                  - CPU, CUDA, oneAPI, and OpenCL libraries (.a, .so)
lib/libforge*               - Visualization library
lib/libcu*                  - CUDA backend dependencies
lib/libOpenCL.so            - OpenCL ICD Loader library
share/ArrayFire/cmake/*     - CMake config (find) scripts
share/ArrayFire/examples/*  - All ArrayFire examples

Because ArrayFire follows standard installation practices, you can use basically any build system to create and compile projects that use ArrayFire. Among the many possible build systems on Linux we suggest using ArrayFire with either CMake or Makefiles with CMake being our preferred build system.

Prerequisite software

To build ArrayFire projects you will need a compiler

Fedora, Centos and Redhat

Install EPEL repo (not required for Fedora)

yum install epel-release

yum update

Install build dependencies

yum install gcc gcc-c++ cmake3 make

Debian and its derivatives

Install common dependencies

apt install build-essential cmake cmake-curses-gui

CMake

We recommend that the CMake build system be used to create ArrayFire projects. As discussed above, ArrayFire ships with a series of CMake scripts to make finding and using our library easy.

First create a file called CMakeLists.txt in your project directory:

cd your-project-directory
touch CMakeLists.txt

and populate it with the following code:

find_package(ArrayFire)
add_executable(<my_executable> [list your source files here])

# To use Unified backend, do the following.
# Unified backend lets you choose the backend at runtime
target_link_libraries(<my_executable> ArrayFire::af)

where my_executable is the name of the executable you wish to create. See the CMake documentation for more information on how to use CMake. To link with a specific backend directly, replace the ArrayFire::af with the following for their respective backends.

ArrayFire::afcpu for CPU backend.
ArrayFire::afcuda for CUDA backend.
ArrayFire::afoneapi for oneAPI backend.
ArrayFire::afopencl for OpenCL backend.

Next we need to instruct CMake to create build instructions and then compile. We suggest using CMake's out-of-source build functionality to keep your build and source files cleanly separated. To do this open the CMake GUI.

cd your-project-directory
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

NOTE: If you have installed ArrayFire to a non-standard location, CMake can still help you out. When you execute CMake specify the path to ArrayFire installation root as ArrayFire_DIR variable.

For example, if ArrayFire were installed locally to /home/user/ArrayFire then you would modify the cmake command above to contain the following definition:

cmake -DArrayFire_DIR=/home/user/ArrayFire ..

You can also specify this information in the ccmake command-line interface.

Makefiles

Building ArrayFire projects with Makefiles is fairly similar to CMake except you must specify all paths and libraries manually.

As with any make project, you need to specify the include path to the directory containing arrayfire.h file. This should be -I /opt/arrayfire/include if you followed our installation instructions.

Similarly, you will need to specify the path to the ArrayFire library using the -L option (e.g. -L/opt/arrayfire/lib) followed by the specific ArrayFire library you wish to use using the -l option (for example -lafcpu, -lafopencl, -lafoneapi, -lafcuda, or -laf for the CPU, OpenCL, oneAPI, and CUDA, and unified backends, respectively.

Here is a minimal example Makefile which uses ArrayFire's CPU backend:

LIBS=-lafcpu
LIB_PATHS=-L/opt/arrayfire/lib
INCLUDES=-I/opt/arrayfire/include
CC=g++ $(COMPILER_OPTIONS)
COMPILER_OPTIONS=-std=c++11 -g

all: main.cpp Makefile
    $(CC) main.cpp -o test $(INCLUDES) $(LIBS) $(LIB_PATHS)