Compiling root6 with visual studio (again!)

[Dimitris1]

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ROOT Version: 6.30.04
Platform: win11
Compiler: vs2022

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Hello,
after re-installing root on a new computer, I installed my known working version of root 5 but was tempted to attempt to switch that to the latest version of Root 6 as above.
The rationale is that there is a binary version of root to download that says Visual Studio 2022 x64.

I speculated that if such a version is released then it would actually work. I was also promissed two years ago that some incompatibilities that existed at that time, would be resolved in the next version (two years ago).

So full of optimism I tried compiling my code with the above version of root. Compiler options are as follows

/permissive /ifcOutput “x64\Release" /GS /GL /W3 /Gy /Zc:wchar_t /Zi /Gm- /O2 /sdl /Fd"x64\Release\vc143.pdb” /Zc:inline /fp:precise /D “NDEBUG” /D “_CONSOLE” /D “_UNICODE” /D “UNICODE” /errorReport:prompt /WX- /Zc:forScope /Gd /Oi /MD /std:c++17 /FC /Fa"x64\Release" /EHsc /nologo /Fo"x64\Release" /Fp"x64\Release\GMD_L2.pch" /diagnostics:column

NB the /permissive flag was initially not activated, but didn’t make much difference either way.

I am using the following tools configuration

And this is the latest installation of VS2022

Unfortunately I seem to be getting very similar compile errors as two years ago:

All around the same spot in TVirtualTreePlayer

Any ideas?

[bellenot]

To be sure to be binary compatible, I would use the same flags than the ones used to build ROOT. You can type root-config --cflags on the command prompt to list them. For example:

C:\root-dev\rootdev>root-config --cflags
 -nologo -Zc:__cplusplus -std:c++17 -MD -GR -EHsc- -W3 -D_WIN32 -O2 -IC:\root-dev\build\x64\debug\include

(but check with your version)
And I would suggest to use CMake to configure and generate your project, it should be compatible then.

[Dimitris1]

Hi Bellenot, thanks for that, so I have recreated a project as a CMake project in VS and I did generate the root compile flags as you suggested from the root-config command.

Then, in the cmake file I print the current compiler options. I can reset those with the options that were indicated by the root-config command (and delete any options that are not mentioned).

The question is, do i leave the linker options as they are? There is nothing special about linker options I need to take care of correct?

Thanks
Dimitris

[bellenot]

Here is a simple CMakelists.txt example, to put in your source directory:

# Check if cmake has the required version
CMAKE_MINIMUM_REQUIRED(VERSION 3.16 FATAL_ERROR)

set(PROJECT_NAME test)
project(${PROJECT_NAME})

find_package(ROOT REQUIRED)

set(CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS "${ROOT_CXX_FLAGS}")
include(${ROOT_USE_FILE})
include_directories(${ROOT_INCLUDE_DIRS} ${CMAKE_SOURCE_DIR})
link_directories(${ROOT_LIBRARY_DIR})

add_executable(${PROJECT_NAME} test.cxx )
target_link_libraries(${PROJECT_NAME} ${ROOT_LIBRARIES})

Then, in a x64 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS 2022, cd to your build directory and type:

cmake -G"Visual Studio 17 2022" -A x64 -Thost=x64 -DCMAKE_VERBOSE_MAKEFILE=ON -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=../install_directory ../source_directory

(replace ../install_directory and ../source_directory with your own)
And then build with:

cmake --build . --config Release

No need to care about compiler or linker flags, they will be set by CMake