Many users prefer to compile GLPK from scratch — although pre-compiled binaries are often available for Windows systems, for Debian and Red Hat-based Linux distros, and perhaps for other platforms. The advantages of manual compilation are listed shortly.
GLPK provides makefiles and batch files for a range of platforms and is known for its straightforward builds — given that your development environment was set up properly.
Manual compilation
The two reasons for having GLPK present are to gain access to:
- GLPSOL — the command-line MathProg model interpreter and solver
- libglpk — the callable solver library that you link to your application program.
A manual build allows you:
- to run the latest code, containing new features and bugfixes
- to customize your build, for instance, to provide support for arbitrary-precision arithmetic
- to be less dependent on package maintainers
- to modify the GLPK codebase.
Reasons to modify the codebase range from runtime reporting tweaks through to experimentation with the mixed-integer solution strategy.
You will need to decide which kind of library to build:
- a static library — with compile-time linking
- a shared library — with runtime linking.
The characteristics of each are discussed at Wikipedia.
If you intend to use GLPSOL, then a shared library is usually preferable. If you plan to link to a custom application you are writing, then a static library means that you need not distribute a copy of libglpk with your application.
If you wish to use non-default features in GLPSOL (such as arbitrary-precision arithmetic), then you will need to hand build GLPK with the appropriate configuration options (--with-gmp) and the correct third-party libraries present (libgmp).
Specific operating systems
There are dedicated pages for compiling GLPK on: