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Daniel Arndt edited this page Feb 16, 2018 · 43 revisions

Using deal.II on native Windows

For an overview of different ways to use deal.II on Windows have a look at the corresponding FAQ entry.

Warning: please be aware that the following is experimental and you will likely encounter bugs in compilers and deal.II itself. Only continue if you are willing to experiment.

Visual Studio

Since deal.II 8.4.0 we have experimental support for the newer Visual Studio C++ compilers (2013 and 2015), but this is still work in progress. Please see the following threads for more details:

Installation instructions:

  1. Download and install Visual Studio 2015 or 2017: https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/ and make sure you select the C++ compiler

  2. Install cmake from https://cmake.org/download/ (pick the windows installer)

  3. Extract deal.II to a folder, for example c:\dealii (or clone the git development version)

  4. Configure using cmake by opening the 64bit command line shortcut and run:

    set PreferredToolArchitecture=x64
cd c:\dealii
mkdir build
cd c:\dealii\build
cmake -G "Visual Studio 15 2017 Win64" ..

    Note: Setting the tool architecture to 64 bit works around problems of the compiler or linker running out of memory and leads to much quicker compile times. Note: Use generator "Visual Studio 15 2017 Win64" for Visual Studio 2017 and "Visual Studio 14 2015 Win64" for Visual Studio 2015.

  5. Compile and install the library by opening deal.II.sln in c:\dealii\build, pick the install target and compile. Note: you need to either compile in the same terminal as above (using cmake --build .) or open devenv.exe from the same terminal, to use the 64 bit tool architecture.

  6. in cmd go to one of the examples in c:\dealii\examples\step-xy:

    cmake -D DEAL_II_DIR=c:\dealii\build -G "Visual Studio 15 2017 Win64" .

  7. Open the newly created solution (step-xy.sln) in that directory and compile/run/debug.

Running build tests on Windows:

Install git and mingw (for perl etc). Then create a .bat file:

git pull origin master
rmdir /Q /S buildtest15
mkdir buildtest15
cd buildtest15
ctest -C Debug -DMAKEOPTS="/m:1" -DCTEST_CMAKE_GENERATOR="Visual Studio 14 2015" -S ../tests/run_buildtest.cmake -V
cd ..

Cygwin / MingGW

Cygwin and forks such as MinGW and MinGW-64 are unsupported due to multiple unresolved miscompilation issues.

Other Windows compilers

We haven't had much success with any other compiler on Windows (Intel, Borland, ...).

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