marian/vs

Building Marian on Windows

Install prerequisites

At least one of the following SDK is required to build Marian on Windows:

• CUDA, Base installer, CUDA 10.0+ is recommended, there might be issues with CUDA 9.2, see below
• Intel MKL

CUDA is required for running Marian on GPU, and Intel MKL for CPU. If only one of them is installed, a GPU-only or CPU-only version can be built.

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Check dependencies : CheckOrInstallDeps.bat

The script CheckOrInstallDeps.bat can be used to verify that all dependencies are found on your system. If not, it will use the vcpkg library manager to download and manage your dependencies for CMake, including the following optional libraries needed only if you want to compile Marian server:

- Boost (1.58-1.72), optional for marian-server (`COMPILE_SERVER=TRUE` in
  `CMakeSettings.json`)
- OpenSSL, optional for marian-server

If you already have a working vcpkg installation, this script can use it. If vcpkg is in your PATH environment variable, the script will find it and use it automatically. Otherwise, you need to edit the script and set the VCPKG_ROOT variable. Please see the script for more details.

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Build the project

There are 3 alternatives to build the project:

1. Use Visual Studio 2017+ built-in support for CMake
2. Create a Solution file for Visual Studio
3. Use a script (MSBuild)

1. Use VS2017+ with built-in support for CMake

VS2017 or newer now allows to develop projects built with CMake without the need to generate VS projects and solutions. For more information, please read this article from the Visual C++ Team.

1. Open the root folder of the git repository in VS (which contains the file CMakeSettings.json) using Open local folder on the welcome page or `File

   Open > Folder...` in a VS instance.

2. Edit the file CMakeSettings.json to set the environment variable for the dependencies. Set COMPILE_CUDA or COMPILE_CPU to FALSE if you wish to compile a CPU-only or a GPU-only version respectively.
3. VS2017 should automatically detect CMakeSettings.json and generate CMake Cache.
4. Build the project with F7. If build is successful, the executables will be in the build folder.

Development

The developing experience is very similar that when using a solution file (Intellisense, build project with F7, debug, set breakpoints and watch variables, ...), except that the project configuration is done in 3 different files:

• CMakeList.txt: this is the CMake source file from the original project. It is used to configure the build targets, add/remove files to compile and configure the compiler flags.

• CMakeSettings.json: this file is required to enable CMake integration in VS2017. Use this file to configure the environment variables and the parameters passed to CMake to generate the project.

• .vs\launch.vs.json: this is an optional user specific file and it is not commited in the Git repo. Use this file to configure the debugging targets.

2. Create solution and projects files for Visual Studio : CreateVSProjects.bat

If you have a previous version of Visual Studio, you will need to use CMake to generate the projects files.

The provided script CreateVSProjects.bat runs the dependency checks then invokes CMake with the right parameters to create the solutions for Visual Studio.

Warning: the Visual Studio Solution file included in the vs/ folder might not work out of the box with your environment and require customization.

3. Use MSBuild : BuildRelease.bat

The last alternative is to use the script BuildRelease.bat that will:

• Check the dependencies.
• Create the VS project files.
• Invoke MSBuild on these projects to build the targets in Release.