We build and test IMP on Windows, built with the Microsoft Visual Studio compilers (we use Visual Studio Express 2010 SP1 for 32-bit Windows, and VS Express 2012 for 64-bit). One complication is that different packages are compiled with different versions of Visual Studio, and mixing the different runtimes (msvc*.dll) can cause odd behavior; therefore, we recommend building most of the dependencies from source code using the same version of Visual Studio that you're going to use to build IMP. The basic procedure is as follows:

• Install Microsoft Visual Studio Express (it is free, but registration with Microsoft is required).
• Get and install cmake.
• Get Python 2 (not Python 3) (make sure you get the 32-bit version if you're going to build IMP for 32-bit Windows).
• Get and install the zlib package (both the "complete package, except sources" and the "sources" installers).
  • The package without sources can be installed anywhere; we chose the default location of C:\Program Files\GnuWin32. The sources, however, must be installed in a path that doesn't contain spaces (otherwise the Boost build will fail). We chose C:\zlib.
  • We found that the zconf.h header included with zlib erroneously includes unistd.h, which doesn't exist on Windows, so we commented out that line (in both packages).
• Download the Boost source code (we extracted it into C:\Program Files\boost_1_53_0), then
  • Open a Visual Studio Command Prompt, and cd into the directory where Boost was extracted
  • Run bootstrap.bat
  • You may need to help the compiler find the zlib header file with set INCLUDE=C:\Program Files\GnuWin32\include
  • Run bjam link=shared runtime-link=shared -sNO_ZLIB=0 -sZLIB_SOURCE=C:\zlib\1.2.3\zlib-1.2.3
• Get and install SWIG for Windows
• Get the HDF5 source code
  • Make a 'build' subdirectory, then run from a command prompt in that subdirectory something similar to cmake.exe -G "Visual Studio 10" -DHDF5_ENABLE_SZIP_SUPPORT:BOOL=OFF -DHDF5_ENABLE_Z_LIB_SUPPORT:BOOL=ON -DHDF5_BUILD_HL_LIB:BOOL=ON -DZLIB_INCLUDE_DIR="C:\Program Files\GnuWin32\include" -DZLIB_LIBRARY="C:\Program Files\GnuWin32\lib\zlib.lib" -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS:BOOL=ON ..
  • Open the resulting HDF5 solution file in Visual Studio, change to Release configuration, then build the hdf5 project.
• (Optional) Build CGAL from source code.
• (Optional) Download the FFTW DLLs and follow the instructions at that website to make .lib import libraries needed for Visual Studio.
  • Copy libfftw3-3.lib to fftw3.lib to help cmake find it
• (Optional) Get the GSL source code and build it:
  • Open the libgsl project file in the src\gsl\1.8\gsl-1.8\VC8 subdirectory
  • Build in Release-DLL configuration
  • Copy the generated libgsl.dll and libgslcblas.dll to a suitable location (we used C:\Program Files\gsl-1.8\lib)
  • Copy the corresponding .lib files, libgsl_dll.lib and libgslcblas_dll.lib (we recommend removing the _dll suffix and the lib prefix when you do this so that cmake has an easier time finding them, i.e. call them gsl.lib and gslcblas.lib).
• (Optional) Get numpy and scipy to match your Python version.
• (Optional) Get and install libTAU
  • Copy libTAU.lib to TAU.lib to help cmake find it.
• (Optional) Get the OpenCV source code and build it by following these instructions
  • Copy each opencv_*.lib to a similar file without the version extension (e.g. copy opencv_ml244.lib to opencv_ml.lib) to help cmake find it
• Set PATH, INCLUDE, and/or LIB environment variables so that the compiler can find all of the dependencies. (We wrote a little batch file.)

• Set up IMP by running something similar to

  cmake <imp_source_directory> -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS="/DBOOST_ALL_DYN_LINK /EHsc /D_HDF5USEDLL_ /DWIN32 /DGSL_DLL" -G "NMake Makefiles"

• Note: if building for 64-bit Windows, you may need to add /bigobj to CMAKE_CXX_CFLAGS.
• Then use simply 'nmake' (instead of 'make', as on Linux or Mac) to build IMP. (cmake can also generate Visual Studio project files, but we recommend nmake.)
• To use IMP or run tests, first run the setup_environment.bat file to set up the environment so all the programs and Python modules can be found. (This batch file needs to be run only once, not for each test.)