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Asked: 2026-05-24T04:58:45+00:00

After watching the WWDC video on the accelerate framework, I saw that it had

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After watching the WWDC video on the accelerate framework, I saw that it had two packages called BLAS and LAPACK. When they talked about BLAS, it sounded like that wasn’t what I wanted however, LAPACK, which they caption “Linear algebra package”, sounds like it does what I want to do.

Could you use the second of these two frameworks, LAPACK, to perform functions such as solving equations, factorising, and other basic algebraic operations? – What puzzled me is when I looked in the apple docs, they have very little reference to LAPACK.

Apple Docs

As you can see here, they have docs on BLAS and not LAPACK

I would be grateful if someone who knows about the accelerate framework could enlighten me on the topic because I know nothing about it!

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  1. Editorial Team

    LAPACK and BLAS provide high-performance numerical linear algebra routines. In particular, they are used to do things like:

    • Multiply two matrices
    • Find the eigenvalues of a matrix
    • Numerically solve a system of linear equations (i.e., an equation of the form Ax = b, where A is a matrix and x and b are vectors).

    It’s hard to tell from your question, but it sounds like what you want to do is symbolic algebra, things like factoring x^2 + 4x + 4 as (x + 2)(x + 2). Is that right? If so, BLAS and LAPACK will not be of much use to you. If not, can you clarify what sort of problems you do want to solve?

    Note that BLAS and LAPACK are sparsely documented by Apple because they are highly standardized interfaces; there is an enormous amount of public documentation already available online and in book form.

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