GLPK for C# and the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI)

The GNU Linear Programming Kit (GLPK) package supplies a solver for large scale linear programming (LP) and mixed integer programming (MIP). The GLPK for C# and the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) package provides a language binding that can be used with C# and other CLI supported languages like F#.

The project homepage is http://glpk-cli.sourceforge.net.

GLPK for C#/CLI provides a common language interface binding for the GLPK linear programming library. It allows you to use the Gnu Linear Programming Kit with all .NET/Mono languages (C#, F#, Python, J#, Scala, Visual Basic, ...).

Makefiles for Windows and Linux are provided.

To report problems and suggestions concerning GLPK for C#/CLI, please, send an email to the author at xypron.glpk@gmx.de.

The GNU Linear Programming Kit (GLPK) supplies a solver for large scale linear programming (LP) and mixed integer programming (MIP). The GLPK project is hosted at http://www.gnu.org/software/glpk.

It has two mailing lists:

• help-glpk@gnu.org and
• bug-glpk@gnu.org.

To subscribe to one of these lists, please, send an empty mail with a Subject: header line of just "subscribe" to the list.

GLPK provides a library written in C and a standalone solver.

The source code provided at ftp://gnu.ftp.org/gnu/glpk/ contains the documentation of the library in file doc/glpk.pdf. This should be your first reference for the usage of the library.

Obtaining the source

The latest release of "GLPK for C#/CLI" is available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/glpk-cli/

You can download the latest development version from the git repository with

git clone https://github.com/xypron/glpk-cli.git

or view it the repository at https://github.com/xypron/glpk-cli/.

Building from source

Linux

To build the package on Linux execute the following commands.

./autogen.sh
./configure
make
make check
sudo make install

For building and running your own application you will need to the following files

• /usr/local/lib/libglpk.so - the GLPK native library
• /usr/local/lib/glpk-cli/libglpk-cli.so - the GLPK for C#/CLI native library
• /usr/local/lib/glpk-cli/libglpk-cli.dll - the GLPK for C#/CLI assembly

You will probably want to add /usr/local/lib/glpk-cli to the MONO_PATH and the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variables.

The following example shows how to compile an application version.exe which writes the GLPK version number to the console.

export MONO_PATH=/usr/local/lib/glpk-cli
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib/glpk-cli
cat > version.cs << EOF
using System;
using org.gnu.glpk;
class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        Console.WriteLine("GLPK " + GLPK.glp_version());
    }
}
EOF
mcs -r:libglpk-cli -lib:/usr/local/lib/glpk-cli/ version.cs
./version.exe

Windows

To build the package on Windows:

• Copy file glpk.h to new directory src.
• Copy files glpk_?_??.* to directory w64.
• Cd to directory w64.
• Verify the paths in Build_CLI.bat.
• Execute Build_CLI.bat

For building and running your own application you will need the following files from the w64 directory:

• glpk_?_??.dll - the GLPK native library
• libglpk_cli_native.dll - the GLPK for C#/CLI native library
• libglpk_cli.dll - the GLPK for C#/CLI assembly

Open issues

• Incomplete documentation
• Missing support for network optimization

Revision history

1.0.0 - 2015-09-26 * initial release