site/en/install/lang_c.ipynb
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TensorFlow provides a C API that can be used to build bindings for other languages. The API is defined in <a href="https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/blob/master/tensorflow/c/c_api.h" class="external"><code>c_api.h</code></a> and designed for simplicity and uniformity rather than convenience.
libtensorflow packages are built nightly and uploaded to GCS for all supported
platforms. They are uploaded to the
libtensorflow-nightly GCS bucket
and are indexed by operating system and date built. For MacOS and Linux shared
objects, there is a
script
that renames the .so files versioned to the current date copied into the
directory with the artifacts.
TensorFlow for C is supported on the following systems:
Extract the downloaded archive, which contains the header files to include in your C program and the shared libraries to link against.
On Linux and macOS, you may want to extract to /usr/local/lib:
%%bash
FILENAME=libtensorflow-cpu-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
wget -q --no-check-certificate https://storage.googleapis.com/tensorflow/versions/2.18.1/${FILENAME}
sudo tar -C /usr/local -xzf ${FILENAME}
On Linux/macOS, if you extract the TensorFlow C library to a system directory,
such as /usr/local, configure the linker with ldconfig:
%%bash
sudo ldconfig /usr/local/lib
If you extract the TensorFlow C library to a non-system directory, such as
~/mydir, then configure the linker environmental variables:
With the TensorFlow C library installed, create an example program with the
following source code (hello_tf.c):
%%writefile hello_tf.c
#include <stdio.h>
#include <tensorflow/c/c_api.h>
int main() {
printf("Hello from TensorFlow C library version %s\n", TF_Version());
return 0;
}
Compile the example program to create an executable, then run:
%%bash
gcc hello_tf.c -ltensorflow -o hello_tf
./hello_tf
Success: The TensorFlow C library is configured.
If the program doesn't build, make sure that gcc can access the TensorFlow C
library. If extracted to /usr/local, explicitly pass the library location to
the compiler:
%%bash
gcc -I/usr/local/include -L/usr/local/lib hello_tf.c -ltensorflow -o hello_tf
./hello_tf
TensorFlow is open source. Read the instructions to build TensorFlow's C library from source code.