Bond

Bond is an open source, cross-platform framework for working with schematized data. It supports cross-language serialization/deserialization and powerful generic mechanisms for efficiently manipulating data. Bond is broadly used at Microsoft in high scale services.

Bond is published on GitHub at https://github.com/Microsoft/bond/.

For details, see the User's Manuals for C++, C# and Python.

For a discussion how Bond compares to similar frameworks see Why Bond.

Dependencies

The Bond repository uses Git submodules and should be cloned with the --recursive flag:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/Microsoft/bond.git

In order to build Bond you will need CMake (2.8.12+), Haskell (ghc 7.4+ and cabal-install 1.20+) and Boost (1.54+). The core Bond C++ library can be used with C++03 compilers, although Python support, unit tests and various examples require some C++11 features.

Following are specific instructions for building on various platforms.

Linux

Bond can be built with Clang (3.4+) or GNU C++ (4.7+). We recommend the latest version of Clang as it's much faster with template-heavy code like Bond.

Run the following commands to install the minimal set of packages needed to build the core Bond library on Ubuntu 14.04:

sudo apt-get install \
    clang \
    cmake \
    zlib1g-dev \
    ghc \
    cabal-install \
    libboost-dev \
    libboost-thread-dev

cabal update
cabal install cabal-install

In the root bond directory run:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
sudo make install

The build directory is just an example. Any directory can be used for build destination.

In order to build all the C++ and Python tests and examples, a few more packages are needed:

sudo apt-get install \
    python2.7-dev \
    libboost-date-time-dev \
    libboost-test-dev \
    libboost-python-dev

Running the following command in the build directory will build and execute all the tests and examples:

make --jobs 8 check

(unit tests are large so you may want to run 4-8 build jobs in parallel, assuming you have enough memory)

OS X

Install XCode and then run the following command to install required packages using Homebrew (http://brew.sh/):

brew install \
    cmake \
    ghc \
    cabal-install \
    boost \
    boost-python

(boost-python is optional and only needed for Python support)

Bond can be built on OS X using either standard *nix makefiles or XCode. In order to generate and build makefiles, in the root bond directory run:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
sudo make install

Alternatively you can generate XCode project by passing -G Xcode option to cmake:

cmake -G Xcode ..

You can build and run unit tests by building the check target in XCode or by running make in the build directory:

make --jobs 8 check

Note that if you are using Homebrew's Python, you'll need to build boost-python from source:

brew install --build-from-source boost-python

and tell cmake the location of Homebrew's libpython by setting PYTHON_LIBRARY variable, e.g.:

cmake .. -DPYTHON_LIBRARY=/usr/local/Cellar/python/2.7.9/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/libpython2.7.dylib

Windows

Install the following tools:

• Visual Studio 2013
• CMake (http://www.cmake.org/download/)
• Haskell Platform (http://haskell.org/platform/)

Update cabal to the latest version (if behind a proxy, set environment variable HTTP_PROXY=http://proxy:port before running cabal):

cabal update
cabal install cabal-install

Now you are ready to build the C# version of Bond. Open the solution file cs\cs.sln in Visual Studio 2013 and build as usual. The C# unit tests can also be run from within the solution.

The C++ and Python versions of Bond additionally require:

• Boost 1.54+ (http://www.boost.org/users/download/)
• Python 2.7 (https://www.python.org/downloads/)

You may need to set the environment variables BOOST_ROOT and BOOST_LIBRARYDIR to specify where Boost and its pre-built libraries for your environment can be found. The core Bond library and most examples only require Boost headers. The pre-built libraries are only needed for unit tests and Python support. If Boost or Python libraries are not found on the system then some tests and examples will not be built.

In order to configure C++/Python project run cmake-gui, select the root of this repository as the source code directory and some other directory as the target for generated project files and build binaries. Now press Generate and select desired target build environment. This configuration step has to be performed only once. From now on you can use the generated solution bond.sln.

IMPORTANT: Bond unit tests are very large. If you are building using the Visual Studio toolchain you have to select 64-bit tools by setting the following environment variable:

For Visual Studio 2012:

set _IsNativeEnvironment=true

For Visual Studio 2013:

set PreferredToolArchitecture=x64

In order to run unit tests on the Debug build, execute the following command in the build directory:

ctest -C Debug