API

oneDNN has both C and C++ APIs available to users for convenience. There is almost a one-to-one correspondence as far as features are concerned, so users can choose based on language preference and switch back and forth in their projects if they desire. Most of the users choose C++ API though.

The differences are shown in the table below.

Features

C API

**

Minimal standard version

C99

C++11

Functional coverage

Full

May require use of the C API

Error handling

Functions return status

Functions throw exceptions

Verbosity

High

Medium

Implementation

Completely inside the library

Header-based thin wrapper around the C API

Purpose

Provide simple API and stable ABI to the library

Improve usability

Target audience

Experienced users, FFI

Most of the users and framework developers

Input validation notes

oneDNN performs limited input validation to minimize the performance overheads. The user application is responsible for sanitizing inputs passed to the library. Examples of the inputs that may result in unexpected consequences:

  • Not-a-number (NaN) floating point values

  • Large u8 or s8 inputs may lead to accumulator overflow

  • While the bf16 16-bit floating point data type has range close to 32-bit floating point data type, there is a significant reduction in precision.

As oneDNN API accepts raw pointers as parameters it’s the calling code responsibility to

  • Allocate memory and validate the buffer sizes before passing them to the library

  • Ensure that the data buffers do not overlap unless the functionality explicitly permits in-place computations