Could someone point me to a place that tells me how to install boost for Visual Studio 17

[JerrodP]

I've tried all day and the documentation is very vague and assumes a good bit of knowledge. I've tried following multiple online guides, but they all seem out of date or just impossible to follow

[LegalizeAdulthood]

This information should be covered in the documentation for the language track. Did you look there?

[NobbZ]

In v2 the tracks documentation is very hard to discover.

It is only a small area below the progress meters that are links to the tracks documentation, also I have not yet checked if everything of the old documentation is still available.

Until then, the installation documentation is available in this repository:

https://github.com/exercism/cpp/blob/master/docs/INSTALLATION.md

[dlwalter]

The instructions are pretty vague for getting boost setup and difficult to follow for anyone who is at the "hello world" level of c++.

Windows users can download compiled binaries from sourceforge. You must download the version appropriate for your compiler. Note that the version number is different from your Visual Studio version; the compiler version in Visual Studio 2015 is MSVC 14.0.

In the descriptions, 32-bit refers to the kind of code generated by your compiler and not the operating system. Code compiled for 32-bit will run on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows. Code compiled for 64-bit will only run on 64-bit versions of Windows. The CMake recipes used in exercism create 32-bit projects for Visual Studio, so download the appropriate 32-bit version of Boost.

Once you download the compiled binaries, install them into a suitable location. The installed location will contain a libraries directory named similarly to the install executable, such as lib32-msvc-12.0. Rename this directory to lib so that CMake can find the precompiled libraries. If you don't rename the directory you will see an error like this when you run CMake:

How do we download the compiled binaries? When I download the boost_1_67_0.7z and unpack it I don't have a libraries directory.

Going to the boost website isn't much help:
https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_67_0/more/getting_started/windows.html

The most reliable way to get a copy of Boost is to download boost_1_67_0.7z or boost_1_67_0.zip and unpack it to install a complete Boost distribution.

Where do I unpack it? Do I have to build it to generate the binaries?

The instructions need to be step-by-step without making assumptions about the user. Currently they seem as if they are written by someone very familiar with installing Boost and setting up a development environment when they should be much simpler with very basic atomic steps.

[cgorshing]

From what I've been able to find, using the CMake generator of "Visual Studio 15 2017" implies 32 bit, so I've only been able to get the x86 of Boost to work (i.e. https://sourceforge.net/projects/boost/files/boost-binaries/1.67.0/boost_1_67_0-msvc-14.1-32.exe/download)

In order to get x64 to work, I use the CMake generator of "Visual Studio 15 2017 Win64" and of course the x64 version of Boost (i.e. https://sourceforge.net/projects/boost/files/boost-binaries/1.67.0/boost_1_67_0-msvc-14.1-64.exe/download)

Note: You still need to make sure you match up your version of VisualStudio to the correct Boost download link, the above links are for VS2017.

This is the command I'm using successfully from the <exercism_dir>\cpp\hello_world\build directory:

x86 version:

cmake -G "Visual Studio 15 2017" -DBOOST_INCLUDEDIR:PATH=C:/local/boost_1_67_0 ..

x64 version:

cmake -G "Visual Studio 15 2017 Win64" -DBOOST_INCLUDEDIR:PATH=C:/local/boost_1_67_0 ..

[arcuru]

We've removed our dependency on Boost, see #233. You can now just open the downloaded exercise folder in Visual Studio and everything should just work, you never need to run CMake manually on windows. See the new docs.