ArrayFire for Clojure

Arrayfire-clj provides a minimal Clojure wrapper around the ArrayFire C API using Java 22+ Foreign Function & Memory API via the Coffi library.

ArrayFire is a general-purpose tensor library that simplifies the software development process for the parallel architectures found in CPUs, GPUs, and other hardware acceleration devices.

Requirements

• Java 22+ with FFM API support
• ArrayFire 3.10 library installed (CPU, CUDA, or OpenCL backend)
• JVM flags: --enable-native-access=ALL-UNNAMED

Installing ArrayFire

See ArrayFire Installer for the installation instructions for your operating system.

Configuration

Environment Variables

You can set ARRAYFIRE_LIB to specify the library name if needed:

export ARRAYFIRE_LIB="af"  # Default
# or
export ARRAYFIRE_LIB="afcpu"  # CPU backend specifically
# or
export ARRAYFIRE_LIB="afcuda" # CUDA backend specifically

JVM Options

For Leiningen, add to project.clj:

:jvm-opts ["--enable-native-access=ALL-UNNAMED"]

For deps.edn, add to your alias:

{:aliases
 {:dev {:jvm-opts ["--enable-native-access=ALL-UNNAMED"]}}}

Usage

Example usage:

(require '[org.soulspace.arrayfire.core :as af])

;; Initialize ArrayFire
(af/init!)

;; Print device information
(af/info)

;; Create arrays and perform operations with doubles
(let [a (af/create-array-f64 [1.0 2.0 3.0] [3])
      b (af/create-array-f64 [10.0 20.0 30.0] [3])
      c (af/add a b)]
  (println (af/to-host-f64 c 3))
  ;; => [11.0 22.0 33.0]
  (af/release a)
  (af/release b)
  (af/release c))

;; Complex number operations
(let [a (af/create-array-c64 [[1.0 2.0] [3.0 4.0]] [2])
      b (af/create-array-c64 [[5.0 6.0] [7.0 8.0]] [2])
      c (af/add a b)]
  (println (af/to-host-c64 c 2))
  ;; => [[6.0 8.0] [10.0 12.0]]
  (af/release a)
  (af/release b)
  (af/release c))

;; dtype-next integration (zero-copy on host)
(require '[tech.v3.datatype :as dtype])

(let [tensor (dtype/make-container :native-heap :float64 [1.0 2.0 3.0])
      arr (af/create-array-from-tensor tensor)
      result (af/to-native-buffer arr :float64 3)]
  (println (vec result))
  ;; => [1.0 2.0 3.0]
  (af/release arr))

Rationale

Complex tensors are at the heart of the simulation of quantum systems, e.g. quantum computers. Many other physical systems are also described by formulas involving complex numbers.

The JVM and Clojure are lacking a fast, GPU enabled tensor library supporting tensors over the field of complex numbers. By adapting ArrayFire to Clojure on the JVM, this gap is closed.

Implementation Status

Experimental

Done:

• All ArrayFire 3.10 C API bindings

Work in progress:

• Deeper JVM/Clojure integration
  • error/exception handling
  • resource management

Not done:

• Idiomatic Clojure API
• dtype-next integration

Development

Running Tests

lein test

Copyright

© 2026 Ludger Solbach

arrayfire-clj is not affiliated with or endorsed by ArrayFire. The ArrayFire literal mark is used under a limited license granted by ArrayFire the trademark holder in the United States and other countries.

License

Eclipse Public License 1.0 (EPL1.0)