isa-l/doc/build.md

ISA-L Build Details

For x86-64 builds it is highly recommended to get an up-to-date version of nasm that can understand the latest instruction sets. Building with an older version is usually possible but the library may lack some function versions for the best performance.

Windows Build Environment Details

The windows dynamic and static libraries can be built with the nmake tool on the windows command line when appropriate paths and tools are setup as follows.

Download nasm and put into path

Download and install nasm and add location to path.

set PATH=%PATH%;C:\Program Files\NASM

Setup compiler environment

Install compiler and run environment setup script.

Compilers for windows usually have a batch file to setup environment variables for the command line called vcvarsall.bat or compilervars.bat or a link to run these. For Visual Studio this may be as follows for Community edition.

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community\VC\Auxiliary\Build\vcvarsall.bat x64

For the Intel compiler the path is typically as follows where yyyy, x, zzz represent the version.

C:\Program Files (x86)\IntelSWTools\system_studio_for_windows_yyyy.x.zzz\compilers_and_libraries_yyyy\bin\compilervars.bat intel64

Build ISA-L libs and copy to appropriate place

Run nmake /f Makefile.nmake

This should build isa-l.dll, isa-l.lib and isa-l_static.lib. You may want to copy the libs to a system directory in the dynamic linking path such as C:\windows\system32 or to a project directory.

To build a simple program with a static library.

cl /Fe: test.exe test.c isa-l_static.lib