Building and installing Python bindings

Python bindings are available as wheels on PyPI for importing and using Google Benchmark directly in Python. Currently, pre-built wheels exist for macOS (both ARM64 and Intel x86), Linux x86-64 and 64-bit Windows. Supported Python versions are Python 3.8 - 3.12.

To install Google Benchmark’s Python bindings, run:

python -m pip install --upgrade pip  # for manylinux2014 support
python -m pip install google-benchmark

In order to keep your system Python interpreter clean, it is advisable to run these commands in a virtual environment. See the official Python documentation on how to create virtual environments.

To build a wheel directly from source, you can follow these steps:

git clone https://github.com/google/benchmark.git
cd benchmark
# create a virtual environment and activate it
python3 -m venv venv --system-site-packages
source venv/bin/activate  # .\venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1 on Windows

# upgrade Python's system-wide packages
python -m pip install --upgrade pip build
# builds the wheel and stores it in the directory "dist".
python -m build

NB: Building wheels from source requires Bazel. For platform-specific instructions on how to install Bazel, refer to the Bazel installation docs.