Build under Windows

The following instructions have been tested under Windows 10 Pro. Last full test from our side was for release 1.19.

Prerequisites

Visual Studio

Download Visual Studio Community Edition from from the official website visualstudio.microsoft.com The current build instructions are tested with Visual Studio 2022.

Qt

Download Qt from from the official website qt.io

Make sure to choose the open source version of Qt and download the online installer.

Select the latest Qt version with long-time support (LTS) and open the sub tree. To build BornAgain, only the ‘MSVC 2019 64-bit’ component is needed. Qt Installer Framework is required for creating the installer executable.

Make a symbolic link to the directory corresponding to the current Qt version: if Qt 6.y.z installed in C:\Qt\6.y.z, then in Windows cmd (with administrative rights) execute:

$ mklink /D "C:\Qt\current" "C:\Qt\6.y.z"
$ mklink /D "C:\Qt\msvc" "C:\Qt\6.y.z\msvc2019_64"

CMake

Download the Windows x64 Installer from the official website cmake.org/download

Python + Packages

Python and some Python modules must be installed, as described in Python on Windows.

SWIG

If you want to re-build the Python-API with SWIG, download and install SWIG from the official website swig.org/download.html. Installation instructions are at http://www.swig.org/Doc4.1/windows.html.

Unpack the ZIP file and add its folder to PATH (so e.g. C:\swigwin-4.0.2)

Libraries

Download

C:\opt\x64\include
C:\opt\x64\lib

and paste the corresponding content from the ZIP files in those two folders.

System Enviroment Variables

After those installations your PATH should contain

C:\Qt\6.y.z\msvc2019_64\bin
C:\Program Files\Python39\Scripts\
C:\Program Files\Python39\
C:\opt\x64\include
C:\opt\x64\lib
C:\Program Files\CMake\bin
C:\Program Files (x86)\NSIS

Build

With all prerequisites completed, you should be able to build and test BornAgain in a PowerShell. In there, execute

$OPTLIBS = "C:/opt/x64"
$FFTW3_INCLUDE_DIR = "$OPTLIBS/include"
$FFTW3_LIB = "$OPTLIBS/lib/libfftw3-3.lib"
$QTDIR = "C:/Qt/current/msvc2019_64"
$QTCMake_DIR = "$QTDIR/lib/cmake"
$BUILD_DIR = "build"

mkdir -Force "$BUILD_DIR"
cd "$BUILD_DIR"

cmake -G "Visual Studio 17 2022" -A x64 -T host=x64 -DQTDIR="$QTDIR" -DQt6_DIR="$QTCMake_DIR/Qt6" -DQt6Test_DIR="$QTCMake_DIR/Qt6Test" -DFFTW3_INCLUDE_DIR="$FFTW3_INCLUDE_DIR" -DFFTW3_LIBRARY="$FFTW3_LIB" -DCMAKE_INCLUDE_PATH="$OPTLIBS/include" -DCMAKE_LIBRARY_PATH="$OPTLIBS/lib" -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER_LAUNCHER=ccache -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER="cl.exe" -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER="cl.exe" -B. ..

cmake --build . --config Release

ctest -C Release --parallel 8 --output-on-failure

Build with Ninja (Experimental)

Compilation might be accelerated if Ninja is used as a build system. Download the Ninja binary for Windows from ninja-build.org. Add the binaries to a directory in your PATH; e.g. C:\Program Files\ninja.

To use Ninja as the build system, the compilation cannot be performed in a PowerShell but in the Visual Studio Shell x64 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS 2019 which you can search for in the start menu.

Use the following commands to build BornAgain:

set OPTLIBS=C:/opt/x64
set FFTW3_INCLUDE_DIR=%OPTLIBS%/include
set FFTW3_LIB=%OPTLIBS%/lib/libfftw3-3.lib
set QTDIR=C:/Qt/current/msvc2019_64
set QTCMake_DIR=%QTDIR%/lib/cmake
set BUILD_DIR=buildnj

mkdir "%BUILD_DIR%"
cd "%BUILD_DIR%"

cmake --version

cmake -G "Ninja" -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DQTDIR="%QTDIR%" -DQt6_DIR="%QTCMake_DIR%/Qt6" -DQt6Test_DIR="%QTCMake_DIR%/Qt6Test" -DFFTW3_INCLUDE_DIR="%FFTW3_INCLUDE_DIR%" -DFFTW3_LIBRARY="%FFTW3_LIB%" -DCMAKE_INCLUDE_PATH="%OPTLIBS%/include" -DCMAKE_LIBRARY_PATH="%OPTLIBS%/lib" -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER="cl.exe" -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER="cl.exe" -B. ..

echo "## BUILD START:" %time%
cmake --build . --config Release --parallel 8

echo "## BUILD END:" %time%
ctest -C Release --parallel 8 --output-on-failure