I know it's possible to do since I have seen some internet articles about it, but none specifically outline the process.
I would like to compile MIT MEEP to Visual C++ to use the libmeep libraries in a .NET CLR application. The source provided includes the associated build scripts for a GNU toolchain, but given that I am using Windows, these are unavailable. As well, it requires some dependencies such as blas, fftw, and optionally libctl and hdf5.
I'm not super experienced on this issue. How would I manually configure Visual Studio to build? What would be the specific process?
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I'm doing some experiments with Mingw-w64 and it works great compiling regular C code, linking to the Windows system MSVCRT.DLL C library. But, if I compile C++ code, then mingw's g++ links to what looks like the GNU libstdc++ library. Why? This doesn't happen with regular C binaries. I see commerical Windows software all the time including the Microsoft "C++ redist" package, which I guess matches the version of Visual C++ they use to develop their software. So it seems like there's actually no C++ library by default on Windows. I'd like to use the "system" C++ library and not use the GNU one if possible to reduce the size of the binaries mingw is compiling. But, I also don't want a separate C++ redistributable that needs to be installed. Am I stuck with the GNU library?
MinGW/MinGW-w64 build do use system standard libraries, that are part of Windows.
Visual C++ redistributable and runtime packages are only needed when sources are compiled with MSVC.
If your MinGW/MinGW-w64 build isn't statically linked you may need to ship libstd DLL files, but you can just put them in the same place as your .exe and/or .dll files, along with any other dependancy .dll files.
I actually love the fact that MinGW/MinGW-w64 builds don't need Visual C++ redistributable for several reasons:
The user doesn't need to install yet another Visual C++ redistributable.
The binaries are compact and don't depend on other Microsoft libraries except the ones in the operating system, which increases the chance of your software running well on different Windows versions.
Install (and uninstall) instructions (or installer code) are easier as the Visual C++ redistributable dependancy doesn't need to be installed. In fact you can even run your software as a portable app without installer.
I just want the VC++ compiler, since some C++ graphics libraries (I'm planning to use and learn bgfx...) require it for compilation. For this I’ve downloaded and installed Ms. Build Tools ’13. However, I can’t find it.
My attempts:
1) I’ve ran Windows Command Prompt using the Batch input cl and it echoed 'cl'is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file..
2) I’ve searched for a file with filename cl.exe on both "C:\Programs Files" and "C:\Programs Files (x86)" paths recursively and nothing. There’s no top folder related to MsVC++ or VC++ too, on the disk.
I cannot try to install Build Tools ’15 (nor VS) since the installer downloads at minimum 3 gygabytes and my network isn’t good.
Where can I find the compiler? Otherwise, is there any cross-platform graphics library (at least for Windows and Mac) that doesn’t need MSVC++ (e.g., just G++), please?
As a commenter mentioned, the Microsoft Build Tools 201x include tools to build managed apps (i.e. .Net apps), not native C++ apps. That's the answer to "where is cl.exe?" It's not there. It was never there.
That's true for the Microsoft Build Tools 2015 too, despite what you think and said. You're mixing up Microsoft Build Tools 2015 and Visual C++ 2015 Build Tools. Note the "C++" there (and the order of some of the words).
The Visual C++ Build Tools are the supported and recommended way by Microsoft to Build visual C++ projects without installing Visual Studio.
If your problem is internet connection get someone else to download it for you, seriously. You're really looking at it the wrong way.
Another alternative is the Enterprise WDK. It's "only" 1.9GB.
Otherwise, is there any cross-platform graphics library (at least for Windows and Mac) that doesn’t need MSVC++
Yes, you should be able to use modern OpenGL in a cross-platform way under Mingw using
GLFW (since it's a CMAKE compile-it-yourself library) and the excellent GLAD for handling loading of the modern openGL API on windows.
I'm very new to GUI programming in c++, thus I don't have that much experience.
I created myself a GUI for my programm using the Visual Studio 2017 CRL package and now I'm trying to make this exe available for everyone.
The application works fine for those who have Visual Studio or VC Runtime installed but for those who don't the programm throws something like: "vcruntime140.dll is missing on your computer to run this app".
I am not sure how to link these dll's in my programm so that EVERYONE is able to use it.
I'm also not quit sure how I would link dll's.
There's basically two options.
The Standard in the industry is to ship the Visual Studio 20xx Runtime Redistributable Installer alongside your program, and have it run before anyone tries to run your program themselves, to make sure that the .dll files are installed onto the target computer.
The other option is to change the way that the libraries are linked to the executable at compile-time. This is done with a flag in Visual Studio:
Basically, you want to change the Runtime Library field to either say Multi-Threaded or Multi-Threaded Debug depending on whether you're in Release or Debug mode, as opposed to "Multi-Threaded DLL", which is the default.
Note, however, that you need to make sure that every single library you're using was compiled the same way: if any of them were compiled using the DLL version of the Runtime Library, they'll interoperate with your code in funny ways, and the least of your problems will be that they'll need the DLLs installed anyways, defeating your effort.
Naturally, that's not an issue if all your libraries are Header-Only, but if any of them have been compiled, then you'll need to recompile them using the correct settings.
You need to install Visual Studio 2017 redistribuables on the machine (that's how it works for every version of Visual Studio).
However, I could not find any official link on Microsoft website (probably because this is not officially released yet)....
You probably need to use 2015 version (for which redistribuables are available here) and wait for 2017 to become an official release.
Visual Studio 2017 RC includes much tighter CMake integration, allowing one to skip the intermediate step of generating project/solution files and use CMake effectively as the project file itself. There is sufficient documentation from Microsoft for using these features with regular C++ files, and there is sufficient documentation on this website (example) for making CUDA and Cmake play nicely, when it comes to linking CUDA code to C++ code.
What I can't find information on is how to make CMake, Visual Studio 2017 RC, and CUDA 8.0 all play nicely. This is a difficult problem, because 2017RC has no integration for the CUDA SDK anyways, and I was hoping to use 2017RC so that my C++ interface to the CUDA code could use C++14 and/or C++17. I'm working on the beginning of a large project that will primarily involve writing a static CUDA library that is accessed through C++: so, I'd like to get the CMake to take care of compiling my CUDA sources into a static library, and for it to help with feeding the linking information to Visual Studio. So far, I haven't had any success with using FindCUDA's various features to accomplish this, but I'm assuming that's due to a misunderstanding on my part. I've read through the documentation on separable compilation from Nvidia, but that wasn't helpful for figuring out CMake.
Further, whenever I try to use CMake in VS2017RC, I still end up with the various vcxproj files that CMake likes to spit out. Is this due to an error on my part? How do I edit the build command arguments, or CMakeLists.txt, to get the functionality demonstrated here to work?
The very short (and only at the time of writing) answer is that you can't. CUDA 8 doesn't support VS2017. Only VS2015 is presently supported.
You can always find the compiler/IDE versions which the release version of CUDA supports here
Edit to add that the CUDA 9 release will add official support for VS2017.
All you need to do is set the CUDA_HOST_COMPILER variable to a supported compiler for example the visual studio 2015 compiler.
In my case this is:
C:/Program Files (x86)/Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0/VC/bin/amd64/cl.exe
As both runtime libraries are binary compatible you can use the 2015 compiler within CUDA and compile all the rest of the application with the 2017 compiler.
I'm trying to make a program that works on linux and windows.
I'm writing the program in visual studio in a windows environment.
So I wonder how I could compile my project from visual studio to linux.
The Microsoft C++ compiler is not capable of producing Linux executables.
You will need to use a more portable compiler for your Linux executables, e.g. gcc. Perhaps you may benefit from a cross-platform IDE like Code Blocks or Eclipse rather than Visual Studio.
You should try QT. It is pretty good framework for cross-platform development. The opensource version is free and very well maintained and has the LGPL license. That means you can sell your product as closed source but then you have to dynamically link to QT libraries.
You can use CMake. It will allow you to generate project/solution files for Visual Studio and Makefiles for Linux. This way, you can work using the native tool chain for a platform, while managing a single makefile. However, it's up to you to write portable code and to choose the appropriate libraries for your program to be truly portable.