Thanks Duncan, You say there aren't a lot of people that no how to do that. Do you know of anyone who would? I assume Dirk would be a likely person given the use of Rtools with Rcpp. I am happy to try and work at this as I have a vested interest in getting CUDA packages to become functional on Windows systems but I need somewhere to begin. Basically I'm just looking how to switch out the MinGW g++ with the VS cl compiler. On a Linux system I can create a .R/Makevars file to switch the CXX variable but I don't know how on Windows.
Charles On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 10:41 AM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.dun...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 16/03/2017 11:00 AM, Charles Determan wrote: > >> Greetings, >> >> Not sure if this should be on the Rcpp list but it isn't strictly related >> to Rcpp but to package building involving Rcpp so I am posting it here. >> >> I am often working on GPU packages that use either OpenCL or CUDA. OpenCL >> is nice because it doesn't require a special additional compiler and I can >> build it across platforms with relative ease. With CUDA, it requires the >> 'nvcc' compiler. This is where my problem comes in. On Windows the >> 'nvcc' >> requires the use of the 'cl' compiler within Visual Studio and the >> resulting object files, AFAIK, cannot be linked to object files created by >> g++ (via Rtools). Everything works great on Linux (where the same >> compiler >> is used for everything) but on a Windows system this is causing a lot of >> headaches. >> >> So, at the moment, my conclusion is that it is simply not possible to >> build >> a CUDA package that can be installed on a Windows system. To my >> knowledge, >> no CUDA based R package has a Windows installation functional (please >> state >> otherwise if I am wrong). >> >> My only thought would be if it would be possible to have the Windows build >> use 'cl' for the entire build process. Perhaps that would allow all the >> files to be linked together and create the necessary shared object at the >> end? Obviously the preference is to use Rtools but until NVIDIA updates >> their special compiler to support MinGW tools I don't think that is >> possible. >> > > In principle it should be possible to use cl. In practice, it will > require someone to work out the details of doing it and to maintain it (by > testing R-devel regularly to make sure changes there don't cause trouble > for it). There aren't a lot of people who know how to do that (e.g. I > don't). If you are willing to volunteer to do this (or can recruit someone > to do it), go ahead. Assuming you do a good job, we can put your patches > into the base code. > > Duncan Murdoch > > > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-package-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel