Re: [Starpu-devel] StarPU with Windows and Visual C++ port?

[Samuel Thibault <samuel.thibault@ens-lyon.org>]

George Russell, le Thu 24 Feb 2011 18:31:57 +0100, a écrit :
> I'd like to query if there is a possibility of StarPU being officially 
> ported
> to Windows via the Visual Studio development tools e.g. to compile on 
> Windows
> without the use of GCC and a Unix compatibility layer. The main motivation 
> of
> this would be to allow the use of StarPU on Windows with the NVidia / AMD /
> Intel OpenCL SDKs on GPU / CPU, and our compilers that generate OpenCL.

I'm not sure why we need to build StarPU with Visual Studio to make it
usable in Visual Studio?  Can't we just provide appropriate .h / .def
/ .lib .visual-studio-stuff files?  We already do provide .h, .def and
.lib, I thought that was enough for Visual Studio to be happy (I have to
admit I have never actually used Visual Studio myself, however).

The issue is that we don't use windows in our everyday work, and thus we
won't keep StarPU compilable by MSVC ourself. The MinGW approach permits
to at least share the compiler, which keeps a lot of compatibility
issues with MSVC away. Yes, we could make nightly MSVC builds of StarPU
to spot MSVC issues early, but doing it on the whole code will be quite
some work, while doing it just on the interface (.h, .def) should be
quite easy to keep working.

Samuel