Installing Threading Building Blocks (TBB) using MacPorts

Yesterday, I had to use Threading Building Blocks (TBB), an Intel C++ template library to take advantage of multicore processors. But, I had some troubles to create an executable and I had difficulty to find the solution on Internet. So, I write this thread in order to help futur users of TBB on Mac.

Download and installation

After installing TBB library and its dependencies with the following command:

sudo port install tbb

I got no error messages and I thought everything worked. Indeed, g++ has not problems to find TBB headers. I could compile this code without trouble:

#include <iostream>
#include "tbb/tick_count.h"

int main()
{
  tbb::tick_count t0 = tbb::tick_count::now();

  // Do something very long

  tbb::tick_count t1 = tbb::tick_count::now();
  printf("time = %g seconds\n", (t1 - t0).seconds());

  return 0;
}

g++ -W -Wall -Wextra -Werror -pedantic -std=c++11 main.cc

Compilation errors

Unfortunately, ere are some errors which appears when we add -ltbb flag in previous command:

#include "tbb/task_scheduler_init.h"

int main()
{
  tbb::task_scheduler_init init;

  // ...

  return 0;
}

g++ -W -Wall -Wextra -Werror -pedantic -std=c++11 -ltbb main.cc

Undefined symbols for architecture x86_64:
  "tbb::task_scheduler_init::initialize(int, unsigned long)", referenced from:
      tbb::task_scheduler_init::task_scheduler_init(int, unsigned long) in test.o
  "tbb::task_scheduler_init::terminate()", referenced from:
      tbb::task_scheduler_init::~task_scheduler_init() in test.o
ld: symbol(s) not found for architecture x86_64
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status

This flag allows to load the library files (not only headers). So, if we can not compile with this flag, TBB would be very limited.

The solution

In order to fix this error, type the following command:

source /opt/local/bin/tbbvars.sh

Now, you can execute the compilation command with -ltbb flag. I hope it helps you to save a lot of time. If you still have some error, leave a comment and I will try to help you. In few weeks, I will probably talk about TBB more deeply that is to say how I used it in video processing.