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Building MOOSE on Windows with MSVC

Virtual environment

You may want to use one of the virtual environment systems like Anaconda, Miniforge with Mamba, or Micromamba (https://mamba.readthedocs.io/en/latest/), which will allow you to create isolated Python environments. There are binary packages for most of the requirements in the conda channels (conda-forge). In contrast, pip will actually download the package source code and try to build it locally, which opens up a chain of dependencies on various other libraries.

If you want to keep things slim, micromamba may be ideal because it is a single statically linked C++ executable and does not install any base environment.

In this guide, conda command can be replaced by mamba or micromamba if you are using one of those systems.

To create an environment, open Anaconda command prompt (below we assume Windows CMD shell, you may need to change some commands for PowerShell) and enter

conda create -n moose meson ninja meson-python gsl hdf5 numpy matplotlib vpython doxygen pkg-config clang pybind11[global] -c conda-forge

Note: Please make sure you are using the conda-forge channel (-c conda-forge) for installing GSL and not the anaconda dafaults. The latter causes linking error

This will create an environment name moose. In some terminals (windows cmd?) you may get an error for pybind11[global]. Put it inside quotes to work around it.

Then activate this environment for your build :

conda activate moose

Requirements

  • Install either MS Visual Studio 2019 or MS Visual Studio Build Tools 2019, including the Windows SDK. Add path to this folder in your PATH environment variable.
  • Install the LLVM compiler infrastructure (https://releases.llvm.org/download.html). You can either install it directly, adding its bin folder to the PATH environment variable, or install it with winget from the commandline: winget install llvm
    • To add its executables to PATH in PowerShell, run: $env:PATH="$env:PATH;C:\Program Files\LLVM\bin"
    • Alternatively, if using cmd.exe command prompt, add its executables to PATH in cmd, run: set PATH="%PATH%;C:\Program Files\LLVM\bin"
  • Install git for Windows
  • [Skip] For MPI install MS-MPI (https://github.com/microsoft/Microsoft-MPI/releases/), the only free MPI for Windows
    • TODO: MPI-build on Windows is not supported yet
  • [Skip] Install doxygen
  • Get the environment variable for MS Visual Studio command line tools set up by running
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\BuildTools\VC\Auxiliary\Build\vcvars64.bat"

Gotcha: if you are on a 64 bit cpu, the machine type is x64. MSVC comes with cross compilation support for various machine-os combos (x86, x86_64). You can initialize the architecture according to your specific case (see this stackoverflow comment

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\BuildTools\VC\Auxiliary\Build\vcvarsall.bat" {combo}

Get moose source code and build

  • Clone moose-core source code using git
git clone https://github.com/BhallaLab/moose-core --depth 50
  • Build moose
cd moose-core

meson setup --wipe _build --prefix=%CD%\\_build_install -Duse_mpi=false --buildtype=release
ninja -v -C _build 
meson install -C _build

This will create moose module inside moose-core/_build_install directory. To make moose importable from any terminal, add this directory to your PYTHONPATH environment variable.

Note: for PowerShell, pass the absolute-path of the moose-core\_build_install directory instead of %CD%\\_build_install to the --prefix option

Meson provides many builtin options: https://mesonbuild.com/Builtin-options.html. Meson options are supplied in the command line to meson setup in the format -Doption=value.

  • Buildtype If you want a developement build with debug enabled, pass -Dbuildtype=debug in the meson setup.

    meson setup --wipe _build --prefix=%CD%\\_build_install -Duse_mpi=false -Dbuildtype=debug

    You can either use buildtype option alone or use the two options debug and optimization for finer grained control over the build. According to meson documentation -Dbuildtype=debug will create a debug build with optimization level 0 (i.e., no optimization, passing -O0 -g to GCC), -Dbuildtype=debugoptimized will create a debug build with optimization level 2 (equivalent to -Ddebug=true -Doptimization=2), -Dbuildtype=release will create a release build with optimization level 3 (equivalent to -Ddebug=false -Doptimization=3), and -Dbuildtype=minsize will create a release build with space optimization (passing -Os to GCC).

  • Optimization level

    To set optimization level, pass -Doptimization=level, where level can be plain, 0, g, 1, 2, 3, s.

For standard installation you can simply run pip install . in the moose-core directory.

To build a wheel, you need build and meson-python modules:

conda install meson-python
conda install build

In a terminal, cd to moose-core and run the following:

python -m build

Note on Debug build on Windows

Debug build tries to link with debug build of Python, and this is not readily available on Windows, unless you build the Python interpreter (CPython) itself from sources in debug mode. Therefore, debug build of moose will fail at the linking stage complaining that the linker could not find python3x_d.lib.

The workaround, as pointed out by Ali Ramezani here, is to make a copy of python3x.lib named python3x_d.lib in the same directory (libs). After that, you can run meson setup as follows:

meson setup --wipe _build --prefix=%CD%\\_build_install -Duse_mpi=false --buildtype=debug

and then go through the rest of the steps.

A free graphical debugger available for MS Windows is WinDbg (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/debugger/). You can use it to attach to a running Python process and set breakpoints at target function/line etc.

In WinDbg command line you find the moose module name with

lm m _moose*

The will show something like _moose_cp311_win_amd64 when your build produced _moose.cp311-win_amd64.lib.

Now you can set a breakpoint to a class function with the module name as prefix as follows:

bp _moose_cp311_win_amd64!ChanBase::setGbar