Compiling and Installing STXXL with Visual Studio 2012 and newer (without Boost)

Author

Timo Bingmann (2013)

Prerequisites:

• Microsoft Visual Studio >= 2012 (VC11).
  For older versions you need Boost, see Compiling and Installing STXXL with Visual Studio 2010 and Boost.
• CMake 2.8, visit http://www.cmake.org/
• (a git client for development on the bleeding edge)

Unpack STXXL source code

• Download the STXXL archive from http://stxxl.sourceforge.net
  or use your favorite git client to clone the development version: http://github.com/stxxl/stxxl.git
• Unpack the archive at a convenient location.

Use CMake to Generate Visual Studio Projects

• Open the CMake GUI.
• Fill in the source code field with the place of the STXXL source and pick a build directory.
• Pressing "Configure" brings up a dialog box: select your Visual Studio version (MSVC 11 here).
  Note that you must select between 32- and 64-bit building here.
• Press "Generate" to run the CMake platform checks and to generate the Visual Studio project files.

• After generating the project, CMake presents a list of optional configuration switches. Maybe the most important are BUILD_TESTS and BUILD_EXAMPLES. By selecting them, additional subprojects are generated to build and run the unit tests for STXXL.

Use Visual Studio to Build STXXL

• Afterwards, use Visual Studio to open the stxxl.sln STXXL "Solution" containing the projects.
• Building the ALL_BUILD will first compile the STXXL library sources and then stxxl_tool and the test1 program in local/

• You can immediately start working with STXXL by modifying the test1.cpp code in the local/ directory.
• Simply switch Visual Studio into Release mode for building without assertions and extra checks.
• To build the examples and test suite open up CMake, enable the check-boxes BUILD_EXAMPLES or BUILD_EXAMPLES and press "Generate" again. This will create many sub-projects in the Visual Studio solution.

Note

For instruction on configuring disks on Windows, see Disk Configuration Files

Using STXXL as a Library inside a Project

TODO. If you are an experienced MSVC user, please contribute!