Build on Windows

[naegelejd]

We should build the MRD2 library (and CLI tools) for Windows.

This process should use vcpkg with CMake.

It should be added to both the normal "build" pipeline as well as the Conda pipeline (producing a Windows MRD2 conda package).

[kekeke21]

Hi Joe, I am new to these tools so your instruction notes were helpful, thank you. Below are the steps I followed in MSVS but still failed to build. Could I ask for any suggestion on below that don't match your steps?

My current setup

• Visual Studio 2022 Developer PowerShell v17.14.5
• cmake version 4.0.3
• CMAKE C++ and C compiler: C:/Program Files/Microsoft Visual Studio/2022/Professional/VC/Tools/MSVC/14.44.35207/bin/Hostx64/x64/cl.exe

Steps

1. Microsoft Visual Studio 2022 without C++ CMake tools for Windows and vcpkg package manager components. These conflicted with locally installed package and preferred setting cache variables via terminal.
2. Install cmake and ninja via winget to substitute the removed components above.
3. New project with cpp/mrd directory copied
4. vcpkg.json following the smoketest example but hdf5 removed. HDF5 related lines in yardl generated CMakeLists.txt also commented out.
5. CMakeLists.txt at root defined as

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.19)
# store variable PROJECT_NAME and CMAKE_PROJECT_NAME
project(mrd)
# to compile yardl generated code, need C++17
set(CMAKE_CXX_STANDARD 17)  

# add generated code into the cmake project
add_subdirectory(mrd)
add_library(mrd STATIC)
target_link_libraries(mrd PRIVATE mrd_generated)`

6. cmake -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=C:/vcpkg/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake -DVCPKG_TARGET_TRIPLET​=x64-windows-static ..
7. cmake --build . --target mrd

The last step shows an error below:

MSBuild version 17.14.10+8b8e13593 for .NET Framework

  protocols.cc
C:\Users\kento\source\repos\mrd\mrd\yardl\detail\ndarray\impl.h(5,10): error C1083: Cannot open include file: 'xtensor/xarray.hpp': No such file or directory [C:\Users\kento\s
ource\repos\mrd\build\mrd\mrd_generated.vcxproj]
  (compiling source file '../../mrd/protocols.cc')

[naegelejd]

@kekeke21 , this is due to upstream changes to the xtensor dependency. See also microsoft/yardl#216.

I have updated the smoketest vcpkg.json with a workaround. See if that helps.

[kekeke21]

@naegelejd, I was able to build it after concatenating the MrdWriterBase::schema_ into multiple lines. Without splitting the single raw string literals, the schema json exceeded the 16,384 bytes limit of characters in a string.
I understand this is not a sustainable solution as it edits the yardl generated procols.cc so this is just a patch work to get the build done.This should only matter in MSVS and does not apply to gcc or clang.

Thank you so much for taking your time on this matter!