How can I setup CMake for use with Visual Studio 2

Question

Visual Studio 2017 RC includes much tighter CMake integration, allowing one to skip the intermediate step of generating project/solution files and use CMake effectively as the project file itself. There is sufficient documentation from Microsoft for using these features with regular C++ files, and there is sufficient documentation on this website (example) for making CUDA and Cmake play nicely, when it comes to linking CUDA code to C++ code.

What I can't find information on is how to make CMake, Visual Studio 2017 RC, and CUDA 8.0 all play nicely. This is a difficult problem, because 2017RC has no integration for the CUDA SDK anyways, and I was hoping to use 2017RC so that my C++ interface to the CUDA code could use C++14 and/or C++17. I'm working on the beginning of a large project that will primarily involve writing a static CUDA library that is accessed through C++: so, I'd like to get the CMake to take care of compiling my CUDA sources into a static library, and for it to help with feeding the linking information to Visual Studio. So far, I haven't had any success with using FindCUDA's various features to accomplish this, but I'm assuming that's due to a misunderstanding on my part. I've read through the documentation on separable compilation from Nvidia, but that wasn't helpful for figuring out CMake.

Further, whenever I try to use CMake in VS2017RC, I still end up with the various vcxproj files that CMake likes to spit out. Is this due to an error on my part? How do I edit the build command arguments, or CMakeLists.txt, to get the functionality demonstrated here to work?

Answer 1

The very short (and only at the time of writing) answer is that you can't. CUDA 8 doesn't support VS2017. Only VS2015 is presently supported.

You can always find the compiler/IDE versions which the release version of CUDA supports here

Edit to add that the CUDA 9 release will add official support for VS2017.

Answer 2

All you need to do is set the CUDA_HOST_COMPILER variable to a supported compiler for example the visual studio 2015 compiler.

In my case this is: C:/Program Files (x86)/Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0/VC/bin/amd64/cl.exe

As both runtime libraries are binary compatible you can use the 2015 compiler within CUDA and compile all the rest of the application with the 2017 compiler.