Building from Source

Users installing zyx as a dependency do not need this chapter — cargo add zyx or pip install zyx-py is enough. Prerequisites for every backend are listed in INSTALL.md.

Prerequisites

Rust 1.88 or newer
a C compiler (clang or gcc) for the C backend
optionally, a GPU runtime (CUDA, OpenCL, Vulkan, WGPU); a missing runtime only means that backend contributes no devices
for the optional Tenstorrent backend, the libttsim_bh.so simulator, the riscv32im-unknown-none-elf target, and llvm-tools

The Tenstorrent firmware lives in zyx/firmware/tt-firmware and is built by zyx/build.rs when the tenstorrent feature is enabled; the ISA tables come from the tt-isa crate. No sibling checkout is required:

git clone https://github.com/zk4x/zyx
cd zyx/zyx
cargo build

The Tenstorrent backend additionally needs the RISC-V target and LLVM tools that build.rs uses for the firmware images:

rustup target add riscv32im-unknown-none-elf
rustup component add llvm-tools
cargo build --features tenstorrent

Tests

No GPU is needed for the CPU backend:

cd zyx
AGENT=1 ZYX_DEV=cpu cargo test --lib --tests -- --skip mnist
AGENT=1 cargo test --doc

AGENT=1 strips ANSI colors; ZYX_DEV=cpu pins the C backend. --skip mnist leaves out the integration test that needs the MNIST dataset in examples/data/. A single test binary is cargo test --test 01_unary, and a single test is cargo test --test 01_unary abs_1 -- --exact.

The Local Check Gate

The full local check gate lives in run_ci.sh at the repository root:

./run_ci.sh

It runs the unit and integration tests, the doctests for every README-bearing crate, rustdoc with private items (so stale doc links fail), the examples, the Python bindings when a torch-enabled interpreter is available, cargo fmt --check, and the book’s code examples.

Examples

cd examples
./tiny-net/run.sh          # simplest
./readme-test/run.sh       # transformer block

Each example has a run.sh that downloads its data if needed and runs in release mode.

The Book Itself