Has anyone ever successfully compiled Vowpal Wabbit on a Windows 7 machine?

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com//questions/11694597

Question

I am trying to compile Vowpal Wabbit on a Windows 7 machine and after trying Netbeans, Cygwin, and MinGW I'm starting to wonder if I'm trying something that's even feasible.

Each of the above has required **.h files that aren't designed for windows such as sys/socket.h.

Anyone that has actually done this, I would appreciate any suggestions.

Was it helpful?

Solution

John Langford recently made a post to the VW mailing list saying a Windows port was in progress, but still broken in certain respects. I would suspect that it currently is not possible to get VW running on windows (but I haven't actually tried)

From this thread:

Chris Quirk created a windows port for VW, which is now in the distribution. It's still incomplete: networking and threads are problem points.

OTHER TIPS

  • Run cygwin's setup.exe, type "boost", click on "Default" several times until it changes to "Install", proceed with installing boost library from cygwin.
  • Download latest Vowpal Wabbit and extract to you vw directory.
  • Open cygwin and go to that vw directory, where Makefile is(cd .. (see @home) cd vw_dir)
  • In cygwin command prompt type "make"

After that you can close cygwin, and use cmd to run vowpal.

I took this from a kaggle forum: " I managed to compile VW under Windows 7 64 bit without Professional Visual Studio 2010.

You can do it by using Cygwin ( http://www.cygwin.com/ ).

  1. first of all install Cygwin on your computer: just choose the standard configuration

  2. run Cygwin shell and enter : git clone git://github.com/JohnLangford/vowpal_wabbit.git

  3. after the download have completed write: cd vowpal_wabbit

  4. at this point you can run the command: configure

  5. the configure procedure will point out all the libraries which are missing from your system and that you should install by running again the Cygwin setup

  6. after some iterations of point 5 you will have finally provided all the necessary libraries to Cygwin, and you can run the command: make

7 after the compiler will finish the make of vw.exe, run: make test in order to check if everything is all right with your build.

Now you can start using VW under Windows, just open a shell and try it. "

Another update, binary releases for Windows is now available since 21 June 2016. The latest link as of today is: https://github.com/eisber/vowpal_wabbit/releases/tag/v8.2.0.6

It's available in MSI installer file.

(In case you encounter dead link in the future, please find most recent version from the eisber's github repo.)

I managed to build on 64bit win without cygwin, native windows. Took a long time to set up env for the build so I wrote a blog about it. I know that self promotion is frowned upon but this link has the binary I built on my machine, guaranteed to work on only my machine but anyone is free to try it out.

An update for curious googlers: the VW Windows instructions have recently been updated, and if you get the most recent source you should be able to compile on Visual Studio without major hurdles (I have tried successfully): https://github.com/JohnLangford/vowpal_wabbit/blob/master/README.windows.txt

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