CLP Linear Programming solver ported to WebAssembly

This project brings linear programming library CLP to the browser and node.js via WebAssembly. Given the limited precision of standard double arithmetics when dealing with values over 2^53, the library is compiled with custom floating point precision mapped to boost::multiprecision::number<mp::cpp_dec_float<100>, mp::et_off> (i.e. floating point with 100 decimal values). The interface supports a high level method solve(problem: string, precision?: number): string, where problem is a string specifyign the linear programming input in LP format and precision is just the numeric precision of the values printed as strings when returning the result object. However a low-level API also exist for finer grain control.

Live demo

You can try the solver here

Building from source

You'll need docker installed in your system. Simply run:

npm install
npm run build
npm run test # Optionally run the test suite

Usage

For a browser-based example, please look at the live demo. When running in a browser CLP code will run in a web worker to avoid blocking the UI thread.

To install from NPM

npm install clp-wasm

Then import the library in Javasript and use it:

require("clp-wasm/clp-wasm").then(async (clp) => {
  const lp = `Maximize
   obj: + 0.6 x1 + 0.5 x2
   Subject To
   cons1: + x1 + 2 x2 <= 1
   cons2: + 3 x1 + x2 <= 2
   End`;
  console.log(await clp.solve(lp)); // Prints a result object with solution values, objective, etc.
});

If you don't want to deal with the clp-wasm.wasm asset content and don't mind the extra size and Base64 conversion, clp-wasm.all.js includes the wasm blob as a Base64 string can be used without any extra dependencies.

Diving into the code

ClpWrapper is the main class to look at. It wraps an instance of ClpSimplex, which is the main class in the Clp library. in solver/bindings.cc you can see what methods of the class are exposed to Javascript.

The user guide of Clp itself can be found here and a description of the methods that allows the user to load/set the problem, control algorithm paramters and get at the solution can be found here. Only some methods are exposed to Javascript at the moment.

Clp code comes with a relative large number of verbose messages that are printed to standard output (console when compiled to webasembly) by default. Because of that, we suppressed when creating the javascript glue code that ultimately executes WebAssembly. If you want/need to see Clp native output, you can rebuild the module after commenting out the line Module['print'] = (x) => { }; in common/pre.js with npm run build.