Preprocessor directives

You can control some aspects of Eigen by defining the preprocessor tokens using #define.

These macros should be defined before any Eigen headers are included. Often they are best set in the project options.

This page lists the preprocesor tokens recognised by Eigen.

Macros with major effects

These macros have a major effect and typically break the API (Application Programming Interface) and/or the ABI (Application Binary Interface). This can be rather dangerous: if parts of your program are compiled with one option, and other parts (or libraries that you use) are compiled with another option, your program may fail to link or exhibit subtle bugs. Nevertheless, these options can be useful for people who know what they are doing.

• EIGEN2_SUPPORT - if defined, enables the Eigen2 compatibility mode. This is meant to ease the transition of Eigen2 to Eigen3 (see Porting from Eigen2 to Eigen3). Not defined by default.
• EIGEN2_SUPPORT_STAGEnn_xxx (for various values of nn and xxx) - staged migration path from Eigen2 to Eigen3; see Eigen 2 support modes.
• EIGEN_DEFAULT_DENSE_INDEX_TYPE - the type for column and row indices in matrices, vectors and array (DenseBase::Index). Set to std::ptrdiff_t by default.
• EIGEN_DEFAULT_IO_FORMAT - the IOFormat to use when printing a matrix if no IOFormat is specified. Defaults to the IOFormat constructed by the default constructor IOFormat::IOFormat().
• EIGEN_INITIALIZE_MATRICES_BY_ZERO - if defined, all entries of newly constructed matrices and arrays are initialized to zero, as are new entries in matrices and arrays after resizing. Not defined by default.
• EIGEN_INITIALIZE_MATRICES_BY_NAN - if defined, all entries of newly constructed matrices and arrays are initialized to NaN, as are new entries in matrices and arrays after resizing. This option is especially useful for debugging purpose, though a memory tool like valgrind is preferable. Not defined by default.
• EIGEN_NO_AUTOMATIC_RESIZING - if defined, the matrices (or arrays) on both sides of an assignment a = b have to be of the same size; otherwise, Eigen automatically resizes a so that it is of the correct size. Not defined by default.

Assertions

The Eigen library contains many assertions to guard against programming errors, both at compile time and at run time. However, these assertions do cost time and can thus be turned off.

• EIGEN_NO_DEBUG - disables Eigen's assertions if defined. Not defined by default, unless the NDEBUG macro is defined (this is a standard C++ macro which disables all asserts).
• EIGEN_NO_STATIC_ASSERT - if defined, compile-time static assertions are replaced by runtime assertions; this saves compilation time. Not defined by default.
• eigen_assert - macro with one argument that is used inside Eigen for assertions. By default, it is basically defined to be assert, which aborts the program if the assertion is violated. Redefine this macro if you want to do something else, like throwing an exception.
• EIGEN_MPL2_ONLY - disable non MPL2 compatible features, or in other words disable the features which are still under the LGPL.

Alignment, vectorization and performance tweaking

• EIGEN_MALLOC_ALREADY_ALIGNED - Can be set to 0 or 1 to tell whether default system malloc already returns aligned buffers. In not defined, then this information is automatically deduced from the compiler and system preprocessor tokens.
• EIGEN_DONT_ALIGN - disables alignment completely. Eigen will not try to align its objects and does not expect that any objects passed to it are aligned. This will turn off vectorization. Not defined by default.
• EIGEN_DONT_ALIGN_STATICALLY - disables alignment of arrays on the stack. Not defined by default, unless EIGEN_DONT_ALIGN is defined.
• EIGEN_DONT_PARALLELIZE - if defined, this disables multi-threading. This is only relevant if you enabled OpenMP. See Eigen and multi-threading for details.
• EIGEN_DONT_VECTORIZE - disables explicit vectorization when defined. Not defined by default, unless alignment is disabled by Eigen's platform test or the user defining EIGEN_DONT_ALIGN.
• EIGEN_FAST_MATH - enables some optimizations which might affect the accuracy of the result. This currently enables the SSE vectorization of sin() and cos(), and speedups sqrt() for single precision. Defined to 1 by default. Define it to 0 to disable.
• EIGEN_UNROLLING_LIMIT - defines the size of a loop to enable meta unrolling. Set it to zero to disable unrolling. The size of a loop here is expressed in Eigen's own notion of "number of FLOPS", it does not correspond to the number of iterations or the number of instructions. The default is value 100.
• EIGEN_STACK_ALLOCATION_LIMIT - defines the maximum bytes for a buffer to be allocated on the stack. For internal temporary buffers, dynamic memory allocation is employed as a fall back. For fixed-size matrices or arrays, exceeding this threshold raises a compile time assertion. Use 0 to set no limit. Default is 128 KB.

Plugins

It is possible to add new methods to many fundamental classes in Eigen by writing a plugin. As explained in the section Extending MatrixBase (and other classes), the plugin is specified by defining a EIGEN_xxx_PLUGIN macro. The following macros are supported; none of them are defined by default.

• EIGEN_ARRAY_PLUGIN - filename of plugin for extending the Array class.
• EIGEN_ARRAYBASE_PLUGIN - filename of plugin for extending the ArrayBase class.
• EIGEN_CWISE_PLUGIN - filename of plugin for extending the Cwise class.
• EIGEN_DENSEBASE_PLUGIN - filename of plugin for extending the DenseBase class.
• EIGEN_DYNAMICSPARSEMATRIX_PLUGIN - filename of plugin for extending the DynamicSparseMatrix class.
• EIGEN_MATRIX_PLUGIN - filename of plugin for extending the Matrix class.
• EIGEN_MATRIXBASE_PLUGIN - filename of plugin for extending the MatrixBase class.
• EIGEN_PLAINOBJECTBASE_PLUGIN - filename of plugin for extending the PlainObjectBase class.
• EIGEN_MAPBASE_PLUGIN - filename of plugin for extending the MapBase class.
• EIGEN_QUATERNIONBASE_PLUGIN - filename of plugin for extending the QuaternionBase class.
• EIGEN_SPARSEMATRIX_PLUGIN - filename of plugin for extending the SparseMatrix class.
• EIGEN_SPARSEMATRIXBASE_PLUGIN - filename of plugin for extending the SparseMatrixBase class.
• EIGEN_SPARSEVECTOR_PLUGIN - filename of plugin for extending the SparseVector class.
• EIGEN_TRANSFORM_PLUGIN - filename of plugin for extending the Transform class.
• EIGEN_FUNCTORS_PLUGIN - filename of plugin for adding new functors and specializations of functor_traits.

Macros for Eigen developers

These macros are mainly meant for people developing Eigen and for testing purposes. Even though, they might be useful for power users and the curious for debugging and testing purpose, they should not be used by real-word code.

• EIGEN_DEFAULT_TO_ROW_MAJOR - when defined, the default storage order for matrices becomes row-major instead of column-major. Not defined by default.
• EIGEN_INTERNAL_DEBUGGING - if defined, enables assertions in Eigen's internal routines. This is useful for debugging Eigen itself. Not defined by default.
• EIGEN_NO_MALLOC - if defined, any request from inside the Eigen to allocate memory from the heap results in an assertion failure. This is useful to check that some routine does not allocate memory dynamically. Not defined by default.
• EIGEN_RUNTIME_NO_MALLOC - if defined, a new switch is introduced which can be turned on and off by calling set_is_malloc_allowed(bool). If malloc is not allowed and Eigen tries to allocate memory dynamically anyway, an assertion failure results. Not defined by default.