Help using lubeck on Windows

[jmh530]

On Friday, 23 February 2018 at 12:13:11 UTC, Arredondo wrote:
> Help using lubeck on Windows
>
> I'd like to experiment with linear algebra in D, and it looks 
> like lubeck is the way to do it right now. However, I'm having 
> a hard time dealing with the CBLAS and LAPACK dependencies.
>
> I downloaded the OpenBLAS binaries for Windows 
> (libopenblas.dll), but I am cluless as to what to do with them. 
> I can't find an example of how to link them/what commands to 
> pass to dmd. Any help deeply appreciated.

It is a rather frustrating experience on Windows. I've banged my 
head against my desk a few times trying to get it working.

My suggestion is to get the Windows Subsystem for Linux set up. 
With Ubuntu, you can follow all of the Linux instructions and it 
is pretty easy.

For trying to get it to work on Windows, first look at lubeck's 
dub.sdl, it depends on mir-blas and mir-lapack. So before you 
think about getting lubeck to work, you'll need to get those to 
work. Both of those depend on calling C libraries, you might 
refer to

https://dlang.org/blog/2017/12/05/interfacing-d-with-c-getting-started/

mir-blas depends on the D package cblas, which has headers for 
blas. It uses blas/cblas as libs, so you'll need to link in a 
blas library to get it to work.

mir-lapack depends on the D package lapack, which has headers for 
LAPACK. So again, I'm pretty sure you'll need to link in a lapack 
library to get it to work.

The lapack downloads usually contain a blas, though it may not be 
the most optimized one. The annoying thing is that when you go to 
the download links for things like lapack for Windows
http://icl.cs.utk.edu/lapack-for-windows/
the pre-built libraries require you to either have Visual Studio 
with Intel Compilers or MinGW and D's support with MinGW isn't 
all that great. So then what you'd need to do is use CMAKE to 
compile it with Visual Studio without Intel Compilers. This 
should work on DMD with -m32mscoff or -m64 and LDC. Also, make 
sure you link in the library correctly. Visual Studio's linker is 
different than DMD's when compiling 32bit code. I had given up 
and used WSL at this point rather than compile it myself with 
CMAKE. Less of a headache.