[Guide] Building Dingo on macOS M1/M2/M3 (Apple Silicon)

[Rishabh1925]

Hi everyone,

I recently set up Dingo on a MacBook Air M3 and hit a few issues with linking lp_solve and boost. If anyone else is on Apple Silicon, here is the process that worked for me:

1. Install Dependencies (Homebrew)

The standard install fails because it can't find libraries in /opt/homebrew. First, install the required packages:

brew install cmake boost eigen lp_solve argtable libomp

2. Install Dingo with Custom Flags

The trick is to explicitly tell pip and the compiler where Homebrew libraries are located using environment variables.

Step-by-step:

1. Create a virtual environment:

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate

2. Install build dependencies first:

pip install cython numpy scipy

3. Install Dingo with flags:

# Export flags for Homebrew paths (critical for M3/Apple Silicon)
export CFLAGS="-I/opt/homebrew/include -I/opt/homebrew/opt/libomp/include"
export LDFLAGS="-L/opt/homebrew/lib -L/opt/homebrew/opt/libomp/lib"

# Install in editable mode
pip install -e .

3. Verification

After installation, you can verify it works by running a simple volume check:

import dingo
import numpy as np

# Create a unit cube
A = np.vstack([np.eye(3), -np.eye(3)])
b = np.ones(6)
sampler = dingo.PolytopeSampler(A, b)

print(f"Volume: {sampler.volume()}") # Should be approx 8.0

Hope this saves someone some time!