Building from source on Windows 10 and later

Perhaps the easiest way is to install the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). WSL offers a fully functional Linux distribution that you can run from within Windows 10 (no dual boot). WSL is officially supported by Microsoft and its installation is very easy. Having installed WSL, you may proceed with Building from source on Unix-based operating systems.

Other solution is, for instance, Cygwin. However, to properly compile CHarm under Cygwin with SIMD instructions enabled (--enable-avx, --enable-avx2 or --enable-avx-512), do not use GCC. Under Cygwin, GCC doesn’t seem to properly align the memory which is required to execute SIMD CPU instructions. You won’t get any compilation error, but when running your program or the check program (make check), you will most likely get a segfault error. Clang, for instance, does its job properly, even under Cygwin, so is recommended in this case.

The last path you can (but do not want to) take is to build the library using the Microsoft’s MSVC compiler. To make it work, install some layer that will add the standard installation utilities (e.g. make) that are not found on Windows normally. Next, you may want to use the CCCL wrapper for MSVC. Finally, follow the instructions found in Building from source on Unix-based operating systems. In fact, this is how we build the Python wheels for Windows that are available from PyPI.