intel fortran and MS SDK

[yingwu]

Hi,

Following my question about ifort and MS VC++. I still can not understand what ifort needs. Yes, intel fortran comes with visual studio shell and it can be integrated into visual studio 2008, which works. But for me, the support of visual studio to intel fortran is not very well. For example, code-completion, code intend, multi-target building, etc. Thus I prefer using other IDE, like codeblocks. Another reason I don't want to use visual studio is that VS is too large and I only want to use Fortran part.

OK, without any visual studio or visual studio shell installed in my computer, I install intel fortran. It says I need to install windows platform SDK firstly. I download and install windows platform SDK, specify the path of platform SDK in intel fortran, compile a 'hello world' fortran code, I have the error,

ifort: error #10037: could not find 'link'

I also try windows SDK. The same error comes.

I want to ask

1. why the error above is raised?
2. which version of windows SDK is suitable for intel fortran 11.1.065? Any download link?
3. Which version (integrated or isolated?) of visual studio shell is suitable for intel fortran 11.1.065? Could I have a link to download VS shell?
4. Why intel fortran is so close to visual studio? Sorry for this. I spend most of time under linux. With GCC, intel fortran works very well. For my understanding, intel fortran can work more individually.

Thanks very much,

Ying

[mecej4]

1. The linker used by Intel Fortran is the Microsoft Linker. Similarly, the librarian, LIB.EXE, some DLLs, and some of the VC libraries (LIBCMT.LIB, MSVCRT.LIB) from Microsoft are needed for the Intel compiler to work. Some of these are included in Microsoft's VC redistributables packages, others in VisualStudio, in Platform SDKs, DDKs, etc., many of which are free downloads from Microsoft.

One easy way for you would be to do a full install, and then never use the VisualStudio since you don't like it. Just use the command window environment that the install provides for you.

If, however, you install Intel Fortran without the VS parts, and then install VC-express or a Windows SDK later, you have do a little bit of configuring yourself to get the two systems working together.

It is not hard to do, once you get the hang of it. You will need to edit the files "ifortvars.bat" and "ifort.cfg" in the same directory as the main compiler "fortcom.exe" and put in the proper paths to the Microsoft tools. For example, on one system, in "ifortvars.bat" we have the line

call "c:\lang\MSVCXPRS08\Common7\Tools\vsvars32.bat"

and in "ifort.cfg" we have the linker location specified as

-Qlocation,link,"C:\lang\IVF81\compiler80\IA32\bin"

2. That depends on which version of Windows you want to run on or target for. The Window-7 SDK is the current SDK from Microsoft that is compatible with IFort 11.

3. Integrated, I think. But why do you want to do this by yourself instead of using the install package that Intel provides with IFort?

4. VisualStudio is there if you want it. If the command line tools are all that you want, you can have that and completely forget about VisualStudio. Intel even provides the debugger IDB for people who do not want to use the VS debugger.

[Steven_L_Intel1]

You do not need to use the Visual Studio IDE, but you do need the components that get installed along with Visual Studio. We don't support using a Windows SDK for IA-32 applications, but as mecej4 said, you don't need to do that. Just open a Build Environment command line prompt using the supplied shortcut in the Start menu (Start > Intel Software Development Tools > Intel Fortran Compiler 11.1.xxx > Build Environment for IA-32 Applications) and run your preferred IDE from there (or just compile from there). It will set up everything you need.

You ask why Intel Fortran is close to Visual Studio? That's what the vast majority of our Windows customers want.