Coin CBC Rust bindings

Rust bindings to the CoinOR CBC MILP Solver using the C API.

Tested on Debian 10, AMD64, coinor-libcbc3 2.9.9+repack1-1. For more details on installing the libCbc dependencies, see below.

coin_cbc_sys

This crate exposes raw bindings to the C functions.

coin_cbc

This crate exposes safe rust bindings using coin_cbc_sys. coin_cbc::raw::Model exposes direct translation of the C function with assert to guaranty safe use. coin_cbc::Model exposes a more user friendly, rustic and efficient API: it was used successfully to solve MILP with 250,000 binary variables with unnoticeable overhead.

Examples

See the examples directory.

Prerequisites: installing Cbc library files

The library files of the COIN-OR Solver Cbc need to present on your system when compiling a project that depends on coin_cbc. On a Debian system with a user with admin rights, this is easily achieved with:

sudo apt install coinor-libcbc-dev

If you have pkg-config available, it'll be used to locate the library.

For other systems, without admin rights or if you need a newer version of Cbc (e.g. with bug fixes), you can install Cbc through coinbrew: https://coin-or.github.io/user_introduction#building-from-source

You will then have to either:

1. register the resulting library files with your system, or
2. provide cargo with the location of that library. For the first option, coinbrew provides a command suggestion after successful compilation. The second option can e.g. be done via:

RUSTFLAGS='-L /path/to/your/cbc/install/lib' cargo test

Solving multiple problems in parallel

By default, this crate enforces a global lock which will force multiple problems to be solved sequentially even if solve is called from multiple threads in parallel. This is because by default, libcbc is not thread safe. If you have compiled your own libcbc with the CBC_THREAD_SAFE option, you can disable this behavior by disabling the singlethread-cbc feature on this crate. Do not disable this feature if you are not certain that you have a thread safe libcbc, or you will be exposed to memory corruption vulnerabilities.

License

This project is distributed under the MIT License by Kardinal.