Inquiry on Windows Support for Chai Library

[liyangrock]

Dear Chai Team,

Does Chai currently support Windows? If yes, could you provide a brief tutorial or guide for setup and compilation on Windows? If not, is there a plan or simple way to add basic Windows support, as it would help enable cross-platform development for HPC applications?

Thanks for your time!

Best,
Li Yang

[adayton1]

CHAI is used regularly and successfully on Windows, though in a CPU-only configuration. It is expected to work with CUDA on Windows (and I believe has been compiled successfully in that configuration in a one-off build, but not tested). CHAI uses CMake as its build system, which is supported on Windows, so the build process should be very similar. You might have to select a specific generator (e.g. cmake -G "Visual Studio 17 2022" -A x64) to generate a visual studio solution file, for example. Or supposedly, in visual studio there is built in support for CMake projects (see https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/build/cmake-projects-in-visual-studio?view=msvc-170). Other generators are listed here if you don't use visual studio: https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/manual/cmake-generators.7.html.

[liyangrock]

Thank you @adayton1 . Using "Visual Studio 17 2022" as the generator works well for me. However, when I try to use "Ninja" as the generator, I encounter build errors. Perhaps some unsupported flags have been included in the configuration.

[liyangrock]

Hi @adayton1 , I'm attempting to compile the chai library (v2025.09.0) using the following commands on Windows platform:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -G "Visual Studio 17 2022" -A x64 ..
cmake --build . --config Release

The libraries for RAJA, CAMP, Umpire, and FMT are generated successfully, but chai.lib is not produced. During the build process, the following errors occur:

C:\Users\liyan\Desktop\chai-2025.09.0\src\chai\ArrayManager.cpp(24,29): warning C4273: 's_null_record': inconsistent dll linkage [C:\Users\liyan\Desktop\chai-2025.09.0\build\s
rc\chai\chai.vcxproj]
      C:\Users\liyan\Desktop\chai-2025.09.0\src\chai\ArrayManager.hpp(58,42):
      see previous definition of 's_null_record'

C:\Users\liyan\Desktop\chai-2025.09.0\src\chai\ArrayManager.cpp(24,29): error C2491: 'chai::ArrayManager::s_null_record': definition of dllimport static data member not allowe
d [C:\Users\liyan\Desktop\chai-2025.09.0\build\src\chai\chai.vcxproj]

and

C:\Users\liyan\Desktop\chai-2025.09.0\src\chai\SharedPtrManager.cpp(29,38): warning C4273: 's_null_record': inconsistent dll linkage [C:\Users\liyan\Desktop\chai-2025.09.0\bui
ld\src\chai\chai.vcxproj]
      C:\Users\liyan\Desktop\chai-2025.09.0\src\chai\SharedPtrManager.hpp(65,47):
      see previous definition of 's_null_record'

C:\Users\liyan\Desktop\chai-2025.09.0\src\chai\SharedPtrManager.cpp(29,38): error C2491: 'chai::expt::SharedPtrManager::s_null_record': definition of dllimport static data mem
ber not allowed [C:\Users\liyan\Desktop\chai-2025.09.0\build\src\chai\chai.vcxproj]

Any assistance or fixes would be appreciated.