README

Halide is a programming language designed to make it easier to write high-performance image and array processing code on modern machines. Halide currently targets:

• CPU architectures: X86, ARM, Hexagon, PowerPC, RISC-V
• Operating systems: Linux, Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, Qualcomm QuRT
• GPU Compute APIs: CUDA, OpenCL, Apple Metal, Microsoft Direct X 12, Vulkan

Rather than being a standalone programming language, Halide is embedded in Python. This means you write Python code that builds an in-memory representation of a Halide pipeline using Halide's Python API. You can then compile this representation to an object file, or JIT-compile it and run it in the same process.

Using Halide from C++

Halide is also available as a C++ library. This package provides the development files necessary to use Halide from C++, including a CMake package. On Linux and macOS, CMake's find_package command should find Halide as long as you're in the same virtual environment you installed it in. On Windows, you will need to add the virtual environment root directory to CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH. This can be done by running set CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=%VIRTUAL_ENV% in cmd.

Other build systems can find the Halide root path by running python -c "import halide; print(halide.install_dir())".