Native Acceleration

Native acceleration

Purpose

The display-decay, edge-intensity, and channel-aggregation hot paths live in src/native/c/connectome_kernels.c. They compile into dll/aibrain.connectome.dll and are loaded through src/native/wrapper/connectome_kernels.py. If the DLL is missing or cannot be loaded, AIBrain falls back to NumPy implementations so the application remains usable.

The DLL accelerates display-signal bookkeeping. It does not implement the Qt window, OpenGL renderer, or language-model inference.

Native candidate audit

The remaining computation paths are already backed by optimized native libraries or are not hot numeric kernels: topology generation and autoencoder training use NumPy operations, hashing uses hashlib, and reporting/UI functions create Python objects. Converting those paths to handwritten C would add boundary-copying and maintenance cost without a measurable gain, so the connectome decay, edge, and channel aggregation loops remain the focused native surface.

Build tool

After changing the C source, run from the project root:

py cli\build_native.py

The tool is color-coded in an interactive terminal and:

1. discovers an explicitly supplied compiler, $env:CC, GCC, Clang, MSVC, or a common MSYS2 MinGW-w64 GCC location;
2. compiles the x64 Windows DLL with warnings enabled and optimized release flags;
3. checks that the output is a valid-sized MZ/PE file;
4. loads it through ctypes.WinDLL; and
5. verifies decay_and_count, edge_activity, and region_activity are exported.

Useful options:

py cli\build_native.py --debug
py cli\build_native.py --clean
py cli\build_native.py --compiler "C:\path\to\gcc.exe"

--debug requests an unoptimized debug build. --clean deletes the existing DLL before compiling. --compiler is useful when more than one supported toolchain is installed.

Toolchain failures

Install one of the following when discovery cannot find a compiler: Visual Studio Build Tools with the C++ build tools, LLVM/Clang, or MSYS2 MinGW-w64 GCC. Open a developer command prompt for MSVC so cl.exe is on PATH, or pass the compiler's full executable path with --compiler.