Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] building gnuradio on windows with msvc

[Moeller]

On 02.01.2011 22:38, Don Ward wrote:
> I use MinGW for my "production" GNU Radio system.  It is a pain to gather and 
> build the dependencies, but it's not as hard as it looks, and once it
> works it works forever.   And if anyone is interested, I have a script to do 
> all the work (posted twice, so far, in attachments to this list).
Thanks, I will have to check this out. Will the UHD driver also work in this 
environment?
I'm using the current SVN gnuradio.

> Cygwin is easier to get going, but Cygwin itself and the required 
> dependencies make for a moving target with a continuously changing set of 
> patches
> required to various packages.  Speed doesn't seem to be an issue, apart from 
> much slower builds (probably higher overhead to create a process).
Cygwin is most GNU and POSIX/Linux compatible.
I had to modify some settings for Qt, qwt, qwtplot3d,swig etc.
But you can also use some prebuilt packages from the Cygwin-ports repository
(http://sourceware.org/cygwinports/)
You can use the Cygwin "setup.exe" on download packages from cygwin-ports.
Recently I discovered the "apt-cyg" command-line installer for Cygwin, also 
very helpful.

> I haven't tried building qtgui, grc, usrp2, or uhd on either system, so I 
> don't know what the issues are with these.
I managed to build qtgui and grc, but usrp2 needs access to raw sockets.
That is on of the things Cygwin cannot emulate. On Windows there is a similar 
thing
like http://www.winpcap.org/ , but that's totally incompatible.
I hope with the UHD it will be better. UDP-sockets can be implemented in a
platform-independent way.
With recent SVN versions of Gnuradio I didn't have luck any more,
some Boost library issues. I did not have time yet for debugging this.

> I have never used MSVC, but given the choices I think it is worth pursuing. 
> And I like the idea of being able to use the same build system on all
> platforms, though I can't comment on the practical aspects.
With "Visual Studio Express" and SDK you can get a free version of the MSVC and 
IDE.
I'm not willing to purchase the commercial version. I think the express version 
is quite Ok for this purpose.
But the 64 Bit compiler is not supported directly (needs some tricks and a 
special server SDK).
Current Cygwin has packages of a 64 Bit Mingw GCC compiler. This one creates
native Windows binaries too. What about using the Cygwin environment to create 
native Windows
executables? I used this method for years to create MATLAB Mex functions.
MATLAB Mex DLL cannot depend on the cygwin DLL because of incompatible 
exception handlers.
That's why I used the Mingw-GCC instead of the Cygwin-GCC, both in a Cygwin 
toolchain.

>
> Thanks, Josh, for doing this.  Even if your changes are never incorporated in 
> the main repository, I hope they can be stashed with your notes
> somewhere where the next person with the time and motivation to work on this 
> can find them.
It would be a good idea to support both build systems, if it's really possible.
I've seen this in the IT++ project. But even on Windows I'm using the GNU 
toolchain,
because it's all more comfortable. In the Cygwin bash shell you don't see much 
difference
between Linux and Windows machines. All my scripts are identical for both 
operating
systems, exept some specific settings and environment variables.