32-bit compilation in Visual Studio

[rdamiani]

Hi,
I am using MS Visual Studio 2022 Community with oneAPI HPC-toolkit 2025 to compile an OpenFAST solution in Release Win32 (needed to use a 32-bit DLL), but I get:
fatal error LNK1104: cannot open file 'mkl_intel_c.lib'
I think this requires a different toolkit, but I cannot seem to find the 32-bit version, is there something I am missing to compile in 32-bit mode?
Thank you

[bjonkman]

Intel OneAPI discontinued creation of 32-bit applications starting with their 2025.0 version. You will need an older version to build 32-bit.

See the "Limitations" section here: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/release-notes/intel-oneapi-toolkit-release-notes.html

[rdamiani]

Thank you @bjonkman, in an attempt at getting an older version of the compiler I got oneAPI 2024.2 installed. However, something got corrupted in the VS solution, and now I get this error:

Unsupported
This version of Visual Studio is unable to open the following projects. The project types may not be installed or this version of Visual Studio may not support them.
For more information on enabling these project types or otherwise migrating your assets, please see the details in the "Migration Report" displayed after clicking OK.
- FAST, "[..]\openfast\vs-build\FAST\FAST.vfproj"
- FASTlib, "[..]\openfast\vs-build\FASTlib\FASTlib.vfproj"
- OpenFAST-Simulink, "[..]\openfast\vs-build\OpenFAST-Simulink\OpenFAST-Simulink.vfproj"

Non-functional changes required
Visual Studio will automatically make non-functional changes to the following projects in order to enable them to open in Visual Studio 2015, Visual Studio 2013, Visual Studio 2012, and Visual Studio 2010 SP1. Project behavior will not be impacted.
- FAST, "D:\RRD_ENGINEERING\NREL_CODES\openfast\vs-build\FAST\FAST.sln"

I have tried to reload the projects but I get "incompatible" projects and cannot resolve this issue, I have tried to revert back to my last functioning commit where I had some edits to the code I would not want to lose, but no luck, any recommendations?

[bjonkman]

Have you made any changes to any of these files compared to what's in the OpenFAST repository: FAST.vfproj, FASTlib.vfproj, OpenFAST-Simulink.vfproj or FAST.sln? Does git show any differences in your working copies?

On my version (VS2022 with oneAPI 2024.1), the FAST.sln file is exactly the same with VS2022 as the version NREL has in their repository. The .vfproj files have some white space differences and minor formatting changes. It sounds like your .sln loads but the .vfproj files do not.

I would think you could revert those 3 vfproj files to whatever is in the OpenFAST repo and try again.

Also--likely NOT related to your issue with the incompatible projects--to get 32-bit to work with those older versions, you also need a separate installer for the 32-bit. Here are the 3 installers I used:

I wasn't able to find that file on the Intel web site just now, but they might be there.

[rdamiani]

Thanks again for your help Bonnie, unfortunately I could not get things going, resorted to reinstalling VS 2022 community, which was giving me other issues (including WinSDK install failures) that would not let the oneAPI find the VS installation. In case this may serve to others, I had to remove the folders under ProgramData as discussed here.

I managed to reinstall the HPCkit and BaseKit both 2024.2, then I could reload the project files (.vfproj) which would default to ifort and not ifx; given the deprecation warning, I changed the projects to ifx, and tried to compile (64 bit), but got an error:
FASTlib : error PRJ0019: A tool returned an error code

Ifort seems to work, however. For the 32 bit, it looks like from what you say that I need one more BaseKit_32bit, which I cannot find, I have an open ticket with intel.... quite painful.

[rdamiani]

I have now gotten the missing BaseKit file from Intel, and I was able to compile in 32-bit. However, I am facing this problem, which I did not have before. Using a normal Command Prompt, the execution stops with the same same DLL error, whereas it works within an Intel oneAPI console. Would you know what setting needs to be changed to get the regular command prompt to work properly? Also, any suggestions to get IFX to work (though in 64-bit) in place of IFORT? Thank you again for your time and help!

[deslaughter]

I expect that there is an Intel DLL dependency that is on the path included in the oneAPI console, but isn't in the normal Command Prompt. You can use https://www.dependencywalker.com/ to inspect any executable or DLL and see what shared libraries they depend on. It'll tell you if one can't be found based on your path. Once you determine what is missing, and then were it's located, you can add the directory to your Windows Path environment variable and the normal Command Prompt should work.

[rdamiani]

Thank you Derek, I have tried using dependencywalker, but it returned too many errors, and I cannot clearly understand what it is important there. By using dumpbin /dependents I see that there are 4 DLL dependencies. I had started modifying the path to have the system find them, however I soon discovered that even the oneAPI prompt does not have them in the path, so at least those 4 are not the issue.

For the second question, ifort vs IFX, i found here that it is another open issue.