another windows questions: creating an exe to call from native code

[Jason McIntosh]

Hi Everyone,

I'm sorry to add to all of the questions about Windows, but I've got decades of Windows apps that I can't leave behind.

I don't necessarily need to compile any deal.II code with Visual Studio, but I at least need to be able to call some standalone Windows exe from my native VS code.  So I'd setup deal.II to do some batch processing for me.

So I'm wondering if it's possible to use Cygwin or MinGW-w64 to create such standalone Windows exe's?  Basically compile the code in Cygwin and call it from a Windows app?  From what I read from the Cygwin Wikipedia entry, I can do this, all i need is the Cygwin DLL for support?

I'm just looking for a "yes you can do that" or "no, that's not going to work".  I'd like to avoid spending a week on this only to find that it was never going to work out...  So any help would be appreciated.

Jason

[Bruno Turcksin]

Jason,

right now, the preferred method to use deal.II on Windows is to use Visual Studio 13 with the development version of deal.II. The problem is that we don't use Windows, so we make deal.II work on Windows then, we write new code that breaks on Windows until someone let us know that there is a bug. So my advise to you is to try to use Visual Studio and if there is a bug let us know so we can fix it. People have been able to compile deal.II on Windows before so new bugs should be easy to fix. As far as remember using Cygwin or MinGW-w64 won't work. You will be able to compile deal.II but it will crash when you try to link.

Best,

Bruno

[Wolfgang Bangerth]

On 11/19/2015 02:25 PM, Bruno Turcksin wrote:
>
>
> right now, the preferred method to use deal.II on Windows is to use
> Visual Studio 13 with the development version of deal.II. The problem is
> that we don't use Windows, so we make deal.II work on Windows then, we
> write new code that breaks on Windows until someone let us know that
> there is a bug. So my advise to you is to try to use Visual Studio and
> if there is a bug let us know so we can fix it. People have been able to
> compile deal.II on Windows before so new bugs should be easy to fix.

To the best of my knowledge, one can also tweak the Visual Studio IDE in
a way so that it uses the Intel C++ compiler (which is free) instead of
the Microsoft compiler. ICC is a very good and standards compliant
compiler. MSVC is, on the other hand, a terrible compiler that over the
past 20 years has still not learned to understand a reasonable subset of
C++, and consequently we keep getting into trouble with it because the
standards compliant code we write does not pass MSVC :-(

If you have experience with the Intel compiler, you may be better off
trying to go that route on Windows.

Best
W.

--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wolfgang Bangerth email: bang...@math.tamu.edu
www: http://www.math.tamu.edu/~bangerth/

[Jason McIntosh]

Thanks Bruno and Wolfgang.  I now know there's a path forward with VS so I'll start getting myself familiar with the deal.II API.

Jason

On Thursday, November 19, 2015 at 1:01:22 PM UTC-6, Jason McIntosh wrote:

[Timo Heister]

> To the best of my knowledge, one can also tweak the Visual Studio IDE in a
> way so that it uses the Intel C++ compiler (which is free) instead of the
> Microsoft compiler. ICC is a very good and standards compliant compiler.

I would be hesitant to recommend an approach that (to my knowledge,
correct me if I am wrong) has never been tried or tested. Especially
for a new user of deal.II.

--
Timo Heister
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~heister/

[Wolfgang Bangerth]

On 11/20/2015 11:41 AM, Timo Heister wrote:
> I would be hesitant to recommend an approach that (to my knowledge,
> correct me if I am wrong) has never been tried or tested. Especially
> for a new user of deal.II.

Yes, fair enough. I don't know anyone either who might have ever used this.