Contributing

Building Sleipnir

Dependencies

• C++23 compiler
  • On Windows 11 or greater, install Visual Studio Community 2022 and select the C++ programming language during installation
  • On Ubuntu 24.04 or greater, install GCC 14 via sudo apt install g++-14
  • On macOS 14.5 or greater, install the Xcode 16.2 command-line build tools via xcode-select --install
• CMake 3.21 or greater
  • On Windows, install from the link above
  • On Linux, install via sudo apt install cmake
  • On macOS, install via brew install cmake
• Python 3.12 or greater
  • On Windows, install from the link above
  • On Linux, install via sudo apt install python
  • On macOS, install via brew install python
• Eigen
• small_vector
• nanobind (build only)
• Catch2 (tests only)

Library dependencies which aren't installed locally will be automatically downloaded and built by CMake.

The benchmark executables require CasADi to be installed locally.

C++ library

On Windows, open a Developer PowerShell. On Linux or macOS, open a Bash shell.

# Clone the repository
git clone git@github.com:SleipnirGroup/Sleipnir
cd Sleipnir
 
# Configure; automatically downloads library dependencies
cmake -B build -S .
 
# Build
cmake --build build
 
# Test
ctest --test-dir build --output-on-failure
 
# Install
cmake --install build --prefix pkgdir

The following build types can be specified via -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE during CMake configure:

• Debug
  • Optimizations off
  • Debug symbols on
• Release
  • Optimizations on
  • Debug symbols off
• RelWithDebInfo (default)
  • Release build type, but with debug info
• MinSizeRel
  • Minimum size release build
• Asan
  • Enables address sanitizer
• Tsan
  • Enables thread sanitizer
• Ubsan
  • Enables undefined behavior sanitizer
• Perf
  • RelWithDebInfo build type, but with frame pointer so perf utility can use it

Python library

On Windows, open a Developer PowerShell. On Linux or macOS, open a Bash shell.

# Clone the repository
git clone git@github.com:SleipnirGroup/Sleipnir
cd Sleipnir
 
# Setup
pip install --user build
 
# Build
python -m build --wheel
 
# Install
pip install --user dist/sleipnirgroup_jormungandr-*.whl
 
# Test
pytest

Educational resources

Autodiff

Here's an introductory video on autodiff.

‍Ari Seff. What is Automatic Differentation?. 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wG_nF1awSSY

Linear algebra

3Blue1Brown's Essence of Linear Algebra video series provides geometric intuition for linear algebra.

‍3Blue1Brown. Essence of Linear Algebra, 2016. https://www.3blue1brown.com/topics/linear-algebra

Convex optimization

Visually Explained's Convex Optimization video series provides geometric intuition for convex optimization and the interior-point method.

‍Visually Explained. Convex Optimization, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqwozWPBo-FuPu4d9pFOobsCF1vDGdY_I

Sleipnir's authors learned numerical optimization from the following book and relied heavily upon it to implement Sleipnir.

‍Nocedal, J. and Wright, S. Numerical Optimization, 2nd. ed., Springer, 2006. https://www.math.uci.edu/~qnie/Publications/NumericalOptimization.pdf

See this page for derivations of Newton's method (unconstrained optimization), sequential quadratic programming (optimization with equality constraints), and interior-point method (optimization with equality and inequality constraints). The bottom of that page lists works cited by Sleipnir's internals.

Branding

Logo

SVG, PNG (1000px), PNG (55px)
Font: Centaur

Color palette

Purple	Yellow
6D3D94	FDB813