Installing compilers for building Landlab on a Windows machine

On a Mac, all the necessary C++ compilers needed by Python to build new C++ modules from source code are provided simply by installing the Xcode app from the app store. On a PC you will get these compilers from Build Tools for Visual Studio.

This process is only necessary if you want to build Landlab directly from its source code on your PC. Some parts of Landlab use compiled C++ code to accelerate things, via Cython. If you are using a binary install, as described here, you don’t need to do this.

Getting the compilers

Anaconda provides some of the necessary compilers. Install it first.

The easiest way to discover if you have other compiler issues is to attempt an install! Follow the developer installation instructions until you attempt to perform the developer installation

$ pip install -e .

If you have compiler issues, you will see an error message. On April 24, 2019 on a clean install on Windows 10 this error message said:

building 'landlab.ca.cfuncs' extension
error: Microsoft Visual C++ 14.0 is required. Get it with "Build Tools for
Visual Studio": https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/

Go to the specified website and download the Microsoft Visual C++ compiler. In April 2019 this was done by first downloading “Build Tools for Visual Studio”. Then when installing Build Tools there were options for what exactly should be installed. One of these was the Visual Studio C++ compilers. Once installed, a restart was required and landlab compiled as expected.