Switch between 32-bit and 64-bit user written software like CVX

CVX is a very convenient convex optimization package that allows the user to specify the optimization objective and constraints directly instead of manually manipulating them (by various transformations) into forms that are accepted by commonly available software like quadprog().

What I want to show today is not CVX, but a technique to handle the many different versions of the same program targeted at each system architecture (32/64-bit, Windows/Mac/Linux). Here’s a snapshot of what’s available with cvx:

OS 32/64 mexext Download links
Linux 32-bit mexglx cvx-glx.zip
64-bit mexa64 cvx-a64.zip
Mac 32-bit mexmaci cvx-maci.zip
64-bit mexmaci64 cvx-maci64.zip
Windows 32-bit mexw32 cvx-w32.zip
64-bit mexw64 cvx-w64.zip

You can download all packages for different architectures, but make a folder for each of them by their mexext() name. For example, 32-bit Windows’ implementation can go under /mexw32/cvx. Then you can programmatically initialize the right package for say, your startup.m file:

run( fullfile(yourLibrary, mexext(), 'cvx', 'cvx_startup.m') );

I intentionally put the /[mexext()] above /cvx, not the other way round because if you have many different software packages and want to include them in the path, you can do it in one shot without filtering for the platform names:

addpath( genpath( fullfile(yourLibrary, mexext()) ) );

You can consider using computer(‘arch’) in place of mexext(), but the names are different and you have to name your folders accordingly. For CVX, it happens to go by mexext(), so I naturally used mexext() instead.

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