Help using lubeck on Windows

I'd like to experiment with linear algebra in D, and it looks like lubeck is the way to do it right now. However, I'm having a hard time dealing with the CBLAS and LAPACK dependencies.

I downloaded the OpenBLAS binaries for Windows (libopenblas.dll), but I am cluless as to what to do with them. I can't find an example of how to link them/what commands to pass to dmd. Any help deeply appreciated.

On Friday, 23 February 2018 at 12:13:11 UTC, Arredondo wrote:
> Help using lubeck on Windows
>
> I'd like to experiment with linear algebra in D, and it looks like lubeck is the way to do it right now. However, I'm having a hard time dealing with the CBLAS and LAPACK dependencies.
>
> I downloaded the OpenBLAS binaries for Windows (libopenblas.dll), but I am cluless as to what to do with them. I can't find an example of how to link them/what commands to pass to dmd. Any help deeply appreciated.

It is a rather frustrating experience on Windows. I've banged my head against my desk a few times trying to get it working.

My suggestion is to get the Windows Subsystem for Linux set up. With Ubuntu, you can follow all of the Linux instructions and it is pretty easy.

For trying to get it to work on Windows, first look at lubeck's dub.sdl, it depends on mir-blas and mir-lapack. So before you think about getting lubeck to work, you'll need to get those to work. Both of those depend on calling C libraries, you might refer to

https://dlang.org/blog/2017/12/05/interfacing-d-with-c-getting-started/

mir-blas depends on the D package cblas, which has headers for blas. It uses blas/cblas as libs, so you'll need to link in a blas library to get it to work.

mir-lapack depends on the D package lapack, which has headers for LAPACK. So again, I'm pretty sure you'll need to link in a lapack library to get it to work.

The lapack downloads usually contain a blas, though it may not be the most optimized one. The annoying thing is that when you go to the download links for things like lapack for Windows
http://icl.cs.utk.edu/lapack-for-windows/
the pre-built libraries require you to either have Visual Studio with Intel Compilers or MinGW and D's support with MinGW isn't all that great. So then what you'd need to do is use CMAKE to compile it with Visual Studio without Intel Compilers. This should work on DMD with -m32mscoff or -m64 and LDC. Also, make sure you link in the library correctly. Visual Studio's linker is different than DMD's when compiling 32bit code. I had given up and used WSL at this point rather than compile it myself with CMAKE. Less of a headache.

On Friday, 23 February 2018 at 12:13:11 UTC, Arredondo wrote:
> Help using lubeck on Windows
>
> I'd like to experiment with linear algebra in D, and it looks like lubeck is the way to do it right now. However, I'm having a hard time dealing with the CBLAS and LAPACK dependencies.
>
> I downloaded the OpenBLAS binaries for Windows (libopenblas.dll), but I am cluless as to what to do with them. I can't find an example of how to link them/what commands to pass to dmd. Any help deeply appreciated.

openblas.net contains precompiled openblas library for Windows. It may not be optimised well for exactly your CPU but it is fast enought to start. Put the library files into your prodject and add openblas library to your project dub configuration. A .dll files are dinamic, you need also a .lib /.a to link with.

OpenBLAS contains both cblas and lapack api by default.

We defenetely need to add an example for Windows

Best
Ilya

On Friday, 23 February 2018 at 16:56:13 UTC, jmh530 wrote:
> I had given up and used WSL at this point rather than compile it myself with CMAKE. Less of a headache.

I don’t understand. Wouldn’t WSL produce Linux binaries? I need my project compiled as a Windows .exe, other parts of my development environment depend on that.

On Friday, 23 February 2018 at 18:29:09 UTC, Ilya Yaroshenko wrote:
> openblas.net contains precompiled openblas library for Windows. It may not be optimised well for exactly your CPU but it is fast enought to start. Put the library files into your prodject and add openblas library to your project dub configuration. A .dll files are dinamic, you need also a .lib /.a to link with.
>
> OpenBLAS contains both cblas and lapack api by default.
>
> We defenetely need to add an example for Windows
>
> Best
> Ilya

It is not working my friend. I've been at this for nearly two full days now. All the .lib/.a files I have tried for BLAS and LAPACK just fail to link, including those from openblas.net.
rdmd insists on:

Error 42: Symbol Undefined _cblas_dgemm
Error 42: Symbol Undefined _cblas_dger
Error: linker exited with status 2

Am I missing something?
Thank you.

On Sunday, 25 February 2018 at 14:26:24 UTC, Arredondo wrote:
> On Friday, 23 February 2018 at 18:29:09 UTC, Ilya Yaroshenko wrote:

> full days now. All the .lib/.a files I have tried for BLAS and
 to do:  dmd -L .\openblas.lib
 put the lib file in your code path.

> Error 42: Symbol Undefined _cblas_dgemm
> Error 42: Symbol Undefined _cblas_dger
> Error: linker exited with status 2

On Sunday, 25 February 2018 at 14:25:04 UTC, Arredondo wrote:
> On Friday, 23 February 2018 at 16:56:13 UTC, jmh530 wrote:
>> I had given up and used WSL at this point rather than compile it myself with CMAKE. Less of a headache.
>
> I don’t understand. Wouldn’t WSL produce Linux binaries? I need my project compiled as a Windows .exe, other parts of my development environment depend on that.

Usually what I need is to do some calculation and print the results in the console or write them to a file, so it's fine for me. If you need an exe, then I guess WSL wouldn't be for you.

On Monday, 26 February 2018 at 05:15:48 UTC, jmh530 wrote:
> On Sunday, 25 February 2018 at 14:25:04 UTC, Arredondo wrote:
>> On Friday, 23 February 2018 at 16:56:13 UTC, jmh530 wrote:
>>> I had given up and used WSL at this point rather than compile it myself with CMAKE. Less of a headache.
>>
>> I don’t understand. Wouldn’t WSL produce Linux binaries? I need my project compiled as a Windows .exe, other parts of my development environment depend on that.
>
> Usually what I need is to do some calculation and print the results in the console or write them to a file, so it's fine for me. If you need an exe, then I guess WSL wouldn't be for you.

Okay, so I just finished configuring WSL. The way I want to use my app is having it read from stdin, do some calculations, and write to stdout, in an infinite cycle. I wanted to feed this to some higher level algorithms in Wolfram Mathematica, that's why I needed Windows binaries. But it turns out that I can feed the shell.exe program itself to Mathemtaica, and from there call my compiled-in-ubuntu app and do the same thing. So it looks like I could get away with using WSL after all.

I am new to linux, so I could use some help, and you have clearly done this before. So far I've managed to install dmd and OpenBlas. I guess I should pass some commands to dmd so it knows where to look for the static blas and lapack libraries. Any suggestions?

Thank you,
Arredondo.

On Monday, 26 February 2018 at 17:12:51 UTC, Arredondo wrote:
>
> Okay, so I just finished configuring WSL. The way I want to use my app is having it read from stdin, do some calculations, and write to stdout, in an infinite cycle. I wanted to feed this to some higher level algorithms in Wolfram Mathematica, that's why I needed Windows binaries. But it turns out that I can feed the shell.exe program itself to Mathemtaica, and from there call my compiled-in-ubuntu app and do the same thing. So it looks like I could get away with using WSL after all.
>
> I am new to linux, so I could use some help, and you have clearly done this before. So far I've managed to install dmd and OpenBlas. I guess I should pass some commands to dmd so it knows where to look for the static blas and lapack libraries. Any suggestions?
>
> Thank you,
> Arredondo.

I was using Ubuntu with WSL. For installing, I think I had done

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt-get install libblas-dev liblapack-dev

I think on Linux you can just put blas and lapack in the libs in your dub.json. I always just try to do some simple example first, usually just calling dmd/ldc directly. So long as I can translate it to a dub configuration that is equivalent, then I will switch over. You might look at some of the dub.jsons that are used in Lubeck and other mir projects for reference.

On Monday, 26 February 2018 at 17:40:05 UTC, jmh530 wrote:
> On Monday, 26 February 2018 at 17:12:51 UTC, Arredondo wrote:
>>
>> Okay, so I just finished configuring WSL. The way I want to use my app is having it read from stdin, do some calculations, and write to stdout, in an infinite cycle. I wanted to feed this to some higher level algorithms in Wolfram Mathematica, that's why I needed Windows binaries. But it turns out that I can feed the shell.exe program itself to Mathemtaica, and from there call my compiled-in-ubuntu app and do the same thing. So it looks like I could get away with using WSL after all.
>>
>> I am new to linux, so I could use some help, and you have clearly done this before. So far I've managed to install dmd and OpenBlas. I guess I should pass some commands to dmd so it knows where to look for the static blas and lapack libraries. Any suggestions?
>>
>> Thank you,
>> Arredondo.
>
> I was using Ubuntu with WSL. For installing, I think I had done
>
> sudo apt update
> sudo apt upgrade
> sudo apt-get install libblas-dev liblapack-dev
>
> I think on Linux you can just put blas and lapack in the libs in your dub.json. I always just try to do some simple example first, usually just calling dmd/ldc directly. So long as I can translate it to a dub configuration that is equivalent, then I will switch over. You might look at some of the dub.jsons that are used in Lubeck and other mir projects for reference.

This worked. Thank you jmh530!

I feel like at this moment, lubeck should be clearly marked "not Windows ready", as not everybody will have the inclination/patience to deal with incompatible object file formats or the Windows subsystem for Linux.

I wonder if compiling OpenBlas from source using DMC would solve this. I also wonder if the resulting binaries would be as fast.

Arredondo