Recommended Development Platform

[georg.viehoever]

Hi Juan,
what are the recommended development platforms for the latest PCL in terms of OS, compilers and whatever else is needed? I am particularly interested in Linux and Windows.
Georg

[Juan Conejero]

Hi Georg,

Linux without any doubt. We are going to replace Fedora with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 on all of our development machines in September. The Fedora equivalent is F19, more or less.

[georg.viehoever]

I know you love Linux

My question was more about the prerequisites that I need to develop PCL modules:
Windows:
- Which Visual Studio version? Which patches (if any)?

Linux:
- Which OS version?
- Which gcc/clang/icc version?
- Which binutils version?
- Which GUI (eclipse? Which version?)

Both:
- Which Qt version? Any special requirements on how Qt needs to be configured?
- Other libs that are not delivered with PCL or VS/Linux?

I am asking because I had fun  in the past due to wrong compiler or Qt versions.

Georg

[Carlos Milovic]

Hi Georg
For Win, you'll need at least Visual C++ Express 2013. It should work fine with Visual Studio 2015, with compatibility mode (kind of a PIA, but not much) to get the older projects to work.

For Linux, you'll need glibc 2.17 or later. I'm using Fedora 22 at the office, and F21 at home, without problems.
I'm not using any fancy GUI. Just working with Kwrite or Kate, and make to compile.

For both, I have not installed Qt for this. You'll just need to compile the PCL. I've done it in Linux, and it was pretty straightforward following the instructions in the devTools folder. For win, you should open the VS2013 project and compile.

[Juan Conejero]

As Carlos has said, you need Visual Studio 2013 or 2015 on Windows. The reason is that VS 2013 is the first version that supports a reasonably decent subset of C++11, which is now required for PCL 2.1.

For module development, Qt is only needed for the XISF format support module. If you don't plan to work on XISF, you don't need Qt at all. Otherwise you need a working Qt 5.5 installation, but only the QtCore and QtXml libraries are required in this case.

If you plan on releasing Linux binaries, be careful as to which version of glibc your modules depend on. In practice this means that you should compile on Fedora 19 or Fedora 20, but not Fedora 21 or later, to be sure that your modules don't depend on anything newer than glibc 2.17.

As for tools, I work with Kate almost exclusively, along with a number of custom scripts and utilities that I've been writing over the years for automated code maintenance. When I really need a debug session (which is a serious deal with a monster like PixInsight), I use Eclipse.