Rerun C++ SDK
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Installing ArrowCpp separately

Automatically download & build Arrow from source (default)

By default, the Rerun C++ SDK's CMake script (which is part of the SDK's zip artifact that can be fetched via FetchContent) will download a known compatible version of Arrow from GitHub and add it to the build. The build configuration is kept to the minimum required by the Rerun C++ SDK.

To instead use an existing install of Arrow, disable the CMake build option RERUN_DOWNLOAD_AND_BUILD_ARROW. (by passing -DRERUN_DOWNLOAD_AND_BUILD_ARROW=OFF to your CMake configure step). This will cause Rerun to instead use CMake's find_package to look for a ready-to-use install of the Arrow C++ library.

For more information about CMake config options see C++ SDK CMake.

Install arrow-cpp with Pixi

Pixi is a convenient tool for managing cross-platform project dependencies. In fact, Rerun uses it for our own internal development dependency management, and you will find pixi.toml files in most of our external examples.

Make sure to use -DRERUN_DOWNLOAD_AND_BUILD_ARROW=OFF when building, otherwise Rerun's CMake script will download & build Arrow instead, ignoring your Pixi install. The advantage of using Pixi is that you can rely on pre-built artifacts rather than adding Arrows build to your own. Also, Pixi is of course also useful for managing other dependencies like Eigen or OpenCV, as well as for pinning the version of your build tooling.

Installing Pixi

On Mac or Linux you can just run:

curl -fsSL https://pixi.sh/install.sh | bash

Or on Windows:

iwr -useb https://pixi.sh/install.ps1 | iex

Alternatively if you are already a cargo user, you can install pixi via:

cargo install pixi

See the Pixi installation guide for other installation options.

Adding Pixi to your own project

If you want to use pixi to manage dependencies in your own project, you can simply run pixi init in the root of your project folder. This will create a pixi.toml file that manages the project. After that you can run pixi add arrow-cpp==10.0.1 to add arrow-cpp as a dependency to your project.

Now, any Pixi tasks added to your project will have access to the arrow-cpp library.

Even without tasks, you can run pixi shell to create a shell environment where all your project dependencies (including arrow-cpp) will be available. You can use this pixi shell to run you project's build commands.

Check out the Pixi docs for more information on what you can do with Pixi.

Pixi in action

The rerun-cpp example: https://github.com/rerun-io/cpp-example-opencv-eigen ships with a pixi.toml file to manage its dependencies, as well as a set of tasks to simplify running it.

If you have Pixi installed, all you need to do to run the example is:

git clone https://github.com/rerun-io/cpp-example-opencv-eigen
cd cpp-example-opencv-eigen
pixi run example

Known issues

⚠️ #4050 arrow-cpp needs to be held back to 10.0.1 to avoid conflicts with the rerun-sdk package when installed in the same Pixi environment.

⚠️ On Windows Pixi only downloads release binaries which are not compatible with debug builds, causing runtime crashes. For debug builds you have to build Arrow yourself, see Building Arrow C++ or stick with RERUN_DOWNLOAD_AND_BUILD_ARROW=ON.

Other ways to install arrow-cpp

Rerun will also work with any existing environment install of Arrow that works with find_package.