A program using the hwloc C API (for instance with hwloc-hello.c presented in API Example) may be built with standard development tools. pkg-config provides easy ways to retrieve the required compiler and linker flags as described below, but it is not mandatory.

Compiling on top of hwloc's C API with GNU Make

Here's an example of Makefile for building hwloc-hello.c with GNU Make:

CFLAGS += $(shell pkg-config --cflags hwloc)
LDLIBS += $(shell pkg-config --libs hwloc)

hwloc-hello: hwloc-hello.c
        $(CC) hwloc-hello.c $(CFLAGS) -o hwloc-hello $(LDLIBS)

Compiling on top of hwloc's C API with CMake

Here's an example de CMakeLists.txt which shows variables obtained from pkg-config and how to use them:

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.6)
project(TEST_HWLOC C)

include(FindPkgConfig)
if(PKG_CONFIG_FOUND)
  pkg_search_module(HWLOC REQUIRED IMPORTED_TARGET hwloc)
else(PKG_CONFIG_FOUND)
  message(FATAL_ERROR "FindHWLOC needs pkg-config program and PKG_CONFIG_PATH must contain the path to hwloc.pc file.")
endif(PKG_CONFIG_FOUND)

add_executable(hwloc-hello hwloc-hello.c)
target_link_libraries(hwloc-hello PRIVATE PkgConfig::HWLOC)

The project may be built with:

cmake -B build
cmake --build build --verbose

The built binary is then available under build/hwloc-hello.