BLAS for Nim

This is a Nim wrapper for the BLAS routines.

You can import cblas to use the standard BLAS interface, or import nimblas for a version that is more Nim-friendly.

The Nim version removes the prefixes and uses dispatch based on types instead. This means that, for instance, both cblas_saxpy and cblas_daxpy become simply axpy, and the correct version is chosen by checking the size of parameters at the usage site.

Only a subset of BLAS is available under nimblas, with more operations added on necessity.

For a higher-level linear algebra library based on this, check out linalg.

Linking BLAS implementations

The library requires to link some BLAS implementation to perform the actual linear algebra operations. By default, it tries to link whatever is the default system-wide BLAS implementation.

A few compile flags are available to link specific BLAS implementations

-d:atlas
-d:openblas
-d:mkl
-d:mkl -d:threaded

Packages for various BLAS implementations are available from the package managers of many Linux distributions. On OSX one can add the brew formulas from Homebrew Science, such as brew install homebrew/science/openblas.

You may also need to add suitable paths for the includes and library dirs. On OSX, this should do the trick

switch("clibdir", "/usr/local/opt/openblas/lib")
switch("cincludes", "/usr/local/opt/openblas/include")

If you have problems with MKL, you may want to link it statically. Just pass the options

--dynlibOverride:mkl_intel_lp64
--passL:${PATH_TO_MKL}/libmkl_intel_lp64.a

to enable static linking.