This package provides the shared libraries xfoil_light and xfoil_light_cs, which are both versions of Mark Drela's XFOIL code, with the GUI features removed. These shared libraries may be used to directly access the functions and variables in XFOIL from various programming languages. The functions and variables found in the shared libraries xfoil_light and xfoil_light_cs are identical, except xfoil_light_cs provides a complex implementation of XFOIL which may be used to determine gradients of XFOIL functions via the complex step method.
The code in this package was originally forked from pyXLIGHT (which has since been renamed to CMPLXFOIL).
We recommend using the Xfoil.jl Julia package, which provides a wrapper for the shared libraries provided by this package. See the installation and usage instructions there.
Since at this point in time the code in this package is essentially the same as that found in the CMPLXFOIL project, we recommend using the CMPLXFOIL project instead.
The functions and variables in the shared libraries provided by this package may be accessed using any language's foreign function interface. Creating such an interface may or may not require a lot of work, depending on the programming language.
Assuming that no special boilerplate code is needed, the shared libraries in this package can be built using CMake. For a Unix-like system the following commands may be used:
cd [xfoil_light directory]
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make
make install
By default these commands will build and install the libraries xfoil_light and xfoil_light_cs to /usr/local/lib Note that root privileges (sudo) may be necessary for the installation command.
For examples of how to access these shared libraries see the Xfoil.jl and CMPLXFOIL packages.
Another shared library impelementation of XFOIL (with optional Python bindings) is provided by the libxfoil project.