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

[Cédric Augonnet <cedric.augonnet@inria.fr>]

On 24/02/2011 19:38, Samuel Thibault wrote:
> 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
Hello,

Indeed, even within the PEPPHER framework, people would not have to 
modify StarPU, so that if we manage to provide some standard 
configuration (e.g. supporting OpenCL + CUDA), there is little point in 
making it possible to recompile StarPU from VS. Everything that was 
promised in the PEPPHER project should be doable without modifying 
StarPU's sources (apart from fixing bugs of course).

Keeping the code compatible to the numerous version of VS is tedious, 
and since none of actually even has a VS installed, it's clear that it 
would go unmaintained very soon so we cannot realistically promise such 
as thing. I'm also unfamiliar with VS, but does it make a different to 
take a .dll or some code compiled from VS in terms of function name 
completion and so on ?

That said, this confirms we really need to provide a nightly build 
.dll/.def/.lib or whatever would help windows users.

Best,
Cédric