isa-l/doc/build.md

ISA-L Build Details

Build tools

NASM: For x86-64 builds it is highly recommended to get an up-to-date version of nasm that can understand the latest instruction sets. Building with an older assembler version is often possible but the library may lack some function versions for the best performance. For example, as a minimum, nasm v2.11.01 or yasm 1.2.0 can be used to build a limited functionality library but it will not include any function versions with AVX2, AVX512, or optimizations for many processors before the assembler's build. The configure or make tools can run tests to check the assembler's knowledge of new instructions and change build defines. For autoconf builds, check the output of configure for full nasm support as it includes the following lines.

checking for nasm... yes
checking for modern nasm... yes
checking for optional nasm AVX512 support... yes
checking for additional nasm AVX512 support... yes

If an appropriate nasm is not available from your distro, it is simple to build from source or download an executable from nasm.

git clone --depth=10 https://github.com/netwide-assembler/nasm
cd nasm
./autogen.sh
./configure
make
sudo make install

Windows Build Environment Details

The windows dynamic and static libraries can be built with the nmake tool on the windows command line when appropriate paths and tools are setup as follows.

Download nasm and put into path

Download and install nasm and add location to path.

set PATH=%PATH%;C:\Program Files\NASM

Setup compiler environment

Install compiler and run environment setup script.

Compilers for windows usually have a batch file to setup environment variables for the command line called vcvarsall.bat or compilervars.bat or a link to run these. For Visual Studio this may be as follows for Community edition.

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community\VC\Auxiliary\Build\vcvarsall.bat x64

For the Intel compiler the path is typically as follows where yyyy, x, zzz represent the version.

C:\Program Files (x86)\IntelSWTools\system_studio_for_windows_yyyy.x.zzz\compilers_and_libraries_yyyy\bin\compilervars.bat intel64

Build ISA-L libs and copy to appropriate place

Run nmake /f Makefile.nmake

This should build isa-l.dll, isa-l.lib and isa-l_static.lib. You may want to copy the libs to a system directory in the dynamic linking path such as C:\windows\system32 or to a project directory.

To build a simple program with a static library.

cl /Fe: test.exe test.c isa-l_static.lib