From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Tue Jan 12 2010 - 10:51:39 CST

Hi,
  I forgot to reply about this to VMD-L, so here's a short summary of what
I told Olaf in the VMD biocore chat last week:
  Presently, compiling VMD (and the plugins) on Windows requires the use
of the MS visual studio tools in combination with the cygwin utilities.
We use the MS compilers in all cases, but the plugins are compiled in much
the same way they are on Unix, using "make" etc, though the actual compiles
are using the MS compiler and not GCC. Compilation of the VMD main program
is done within the MS visual studio IDE and is done in the usual way that
other windows applications are compiled.

The main complication with compilation of VMD on the Windows
platform is getting all of the library dependencies compiled using
consistent runtime library and code generation mode settings so
that no problems occur during linkage or runtime. Windows has
many single-threaded and multithreaded runtime library choices and
static vs. dynamic compilation modes and runtime library settings, and
one will only get a functional build if all of them are set consistently both
for the libraries that VMD depends on, as well as the VMD plugins, and
VMD itself. At present it's not possible to compile VMD using GCC on
the Windows platform because we use various low-level Windows APIs that
the cygwin tools have historically not provided wrappers for. This may
have changed with bleeding edge versions of cygwin, but not in any versions
that I've tested previously.

I'm working on making this process less cumbersome for those that
have a strong desire to build VMD for themselves, since compiling
VMD currently requires a fair amount of expertise with development
of Windows software to get things working. At some point I'll
likely revisit compilation with GCC/cygwin and also look into using the
Intel C/C++ tools on Windows, but at present we use the MS tools since they
are the best supported by the other libraries VMD links against.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu
 
On Fri, Jan 08, 2010 at 04:20:47PM +0100, Olaf Lenz wrote:
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> Hi!
>
> I'm very much of a newbie when it comes to compile anything on Windows.
> However, it would be nice to be able to compile the VMD plugins on
> Windows. Is there any HowTo to be found? Or even a hint what tools are
> needed? The developers docs do not seem to be enough...
>
> Cheers
> Olaf
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-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu                 Phone: 217-244-3349
  WWW: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/      Fax: 217-244-6078