Win7: compile 64bit applications

[schmima]

Hi together

I'm developing some software for NGS data analysis.
As I see in our institute, most of the people working in the lab are pretty uncomfortable with Linux and commandline applications. So I started to develop some GUI based applications using Qt. Most of it depends also on the bamtools API (the c++ version of samtools) and this one is therefore a must have.

Up to now, things work really nicely on my Linux machines (well - shutting down several threads linked to each other in an organised way still causes me some headache, but it doesnt create any troubles - "cancel" is simply not implemented). So recently I tried porting it to Windows (64 bit Win7)...

... and I finally know now, why I work on Linux

On the Qt side, compilation (via minGW) works well. I could also get bamtools running (at least the executable). With the libraries I had some problems - the program crashed. While checking the dependencies with www.dependencywalker.com, I found some missing imports (I have the feeling that it is due to the "export ..." statements in the aux.h file). Anyway - I think that I may get this to work if I take some time to go through it. The bigger surprise for me was that everything was in 32 bit (yes - my first time compiling something on windows). As I would like to have it in 64 bit, I tried to get such an environment first. I was searching a bit and could not find any easy way to do this, as there seems to be no native and free 64 bit compiler on windows. I started with cross-compiling (minGW) and came to the conclusion that this is totally annoying... Doing this for basic libraries (zlib and so on) works pretty well. However, I failed miserably with the cmake integration that is at least required for bamtools (well, on cygwin I once managed to get a 64 bit bamtools). Anyway, I would still have to build the Qt libraries from scratch....

Now - the question is:

Do you know any simple and free way to get a 64 bit program out of my code? Or at least - is there a native 64 bit compiler on windows that is for free?

(I am not really in the mood to buy Visual Studio to do this - even though it may be the easiest way)

[arvid]

Not a direct answer to your question, but what about letting people run your GUI software on a Linux server with an X-server installed on their Windows workstations? We do that for some software here, and the lab people here are quite fine with that. In case you wish to store the NGS data centrally anyway (NGS data handling tends to annoy the lab users here as well), this might be a simple and effective solution...

[schmima]

Hi arvid

Thanks for the suggestion.
Would be indeed a relatively easy solution concerning the lab-internal use - and it would also simplify the data handling. Hehe - the only problem is that we are really a "lab-lab"... I'm "begging" for a server for quite some time Let's see if it helps

[alec]

Visual Studio express edition is free. The Windows SDK is also needed to compile 64 bit programs (see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1...c-2010-express).

I was able to compile bamtools with visual studio, although I ended up not using it and can't vouch that there won't be any platform-specific bugs.

[jiaco]

Did you try mingw-w64?

http://mingw-w64.sourceforge.net/

[schmima]

@ alec

Thanks a lot. This seems really promising
I also got now access to the non-free Visual Studios - will try once 2010 Ultimate - so I think that this will be the easiest (as the non-free Versions should also allow me to use the Qt Plugin to import the rest of my project into Visual Studio).

@ jiaco

Hm - yes, I used this one. Once via MSYS and once via Cygwin. Cygwin was slightly more successful/easier. However, in this modes, minGW acted as a cross-compiler (not native 64 bit) and was pretty frustrating to use. What helped me a bit: http://www.gaia-gis.it/spatialite-3....64_how_to.html.