Use in paclets 🔗

Submodule 🔗

In How to use you can learn how to build and install LLU on your system and then use it as a dependent library for your Wolfram Language paclets. There exists an alternative approach which is often quite convenient if you plan to work on multiple paclets that may use different versions of LLU. This approach is to include LLU in a project as a git submodule. Submodules are simply git repos inside other repos but working with them may sometimes be tricky. See this excellent tutorial on submodules.

For SourceTree users there is also a helpful blog post.

In most cases you will access LibraryLink Utilities in “read-only” manner, i.e. you will just update the submodule to make sure you use the most recent version.

Here is a list of commands that might be useful to developers who want to use LLU as a submodule. For the sake of example, assume that we have a sample paclet with a directory CPPSource/ containing all the C++ source code and that we want to place the submodule in this directory. It is easy to modify these commands so that they work for other locations too.

  • Adding LibraryLink Utilities to your paclet

    git submodule add **TODO: Insert LLU clone link** CPPSource/LibraryLinkUtilities

  • Cloning a project that already uses LibraryLink Utilities

    git clone --recursive <paclet's git clone link>

  • Updating LibraryLink Utilities in your project

    git submodule update --remote CPPSource/LibraryLinkUtilities/

Submodules work in a “detached head” state which means they stick to a chosen commit, so even if there are backwards incompatible changes merged to LLU master your project will not be affected unless you manually update the submodule.

With LLU attached to your project in a submodule you always have the sources so you only need to follow steps 2 - 4 described in the official build instructions.

Paclets that use LLU 🔗

If you look for examples of LLU usage and whatever is in this documentation and in the Demo project was not enough, you can take a look at paclets built into the Wolfram Language that use LLU. You will not be able to see the C++ source code or the CMake build script but you can still investigate the paclet structure and the Wolfram Language code. Paclets can be found in the SystemFiles/Links subdirectory of your installation.

The list below may not be complete.

  • ArchiveTools

  • DICOMTools

  • FFmpegTools

  • SVTools