Visual Studio Community 2017 cl.exe

Question

I am working on compiling some CUDA kernels on a Windows system. From my understanding, the nvcc compiler requires the use of cl.exe to compile on Windows systems. The primary way to get this is with Visual Studio. I have therefore installed the free community edition. After which I expected there to be the bin directory within the VC directory as shown in multiple other questions such as this one and this one. And yet, I need to go to several layers deeper to find

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Community\VC\Tools\MSVC\14.10.25017\bin\HostX64\x64\cl.exe 

This particular project is intended to make a program that can be compiled and used on multiple different Windows systems. Do I really need to expect the cl.exe file to be this nested or did I miss some sort of installation step here? I was expecting a shorter path:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Community\VC\bin\ 

Ultimately I need as simple a way as possible for users to be able to have their environment find the cl.exe file. Generally this involves (at the highest level) setting an environmental variable.

Answer 1

I had this problem in a different context (Elixir/Phoenix, Rust), but the root cause was the same: cl.exe could not be found during compilation.

My setup was:

• Windows 10, x64
• Visual Studio Community 2017 already installed, but only for C# development

For some reason the solution with installing the Visual C++ Build Tools (as @cozzamara suggested) did not work. Stops during installation with some obscure error message. Guess it did not liked my existing Visual Studio installation.

This is how I solved it:

1. Start up the Visual Studio Installer
2. Check the Desktop development with C++ (screenshots here)

3. Execute following command before compiling:

   C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Community\VC\Auxiliary\Build\vcvars64.bat 

   From this on the command cl.exe works. Alternatively (and more conveniently for development) start the application 'Developer Command Prompt for VS 2017' or 'x64 Native Tools Command Prompt VS 2017'.

Answer 2

Look for VCVARSALL.BAT -- that's usually at a higher level. If you run that it sets up your environment so that you can just call CL without a path.

Documentation here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/f2ccy3wt.aspx