Help installing C dependency (FAISS) for Haskell bindings

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1

Hi everyone,

I’m currently working on Haskell bindings for FAISS, and I need to include the C library (faiss_c) as a dependency during installation of the Haskell package (faiss-hs).

Right now, installing the FAISS C library manually looks like this:

git clone https://github.com/facebookresearch/faiss
cmake -B build . -FAISS_ENABLE_C_API=ON -BUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON
make -C build -j faiss
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=${faissCustom}/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

I’d like to automate this as part of the Haskell package installation process, ideally in a clean, cross-platform, Cabal/Nix/Stack-friendly way.

Questions:

  1. What’s the best practice for including and building C dependencies like this within a Haskell package?
  2. Are there examples of Haskell libraries or repositories that install C dependencies during setup, or at least manage them cleanly?
  3. Should I expect users to install faiss_c manually, or is it reasonable to build it from source as part of the Haskell package setup?

Any advice, pointers, or examples would be much appreciated. Thanks!

2

Yes. The most battle-tested example is probably zlib.