Debug builds are broken

[aymanhab]

Because we use prebuilt libraries (Release) and on Windows platform we can't mix Release and Debug libraries, the end result is that it's impossible to have debuggable development environment on Windows platform. This needs to be fixed (possibly by not linking or disabling parts of the code that rely on the prebuilt libraries

[aymanhab]

By turning off the build of adloc, casadi, colpack, eigen, ipopt in dependencies, I can get debuggable build on Windows without any code or cmake changes, this will allow me and others to partially proceed testing and debugging but I will leave this issue open as a placeholder until this solution is documented or a better solution that allows for full debugging of moco solvers on windows is investigated.

[nickbianco]

Could you post the build error you are receiving when you try to build after only disabling IPOPT?

[nathantpickle]

I've only recently started developing with OpenSim, so apologies if I'm misunderstanding the context here, but this caught my eye because I've also been wondering how best to achieve debugging on Windows. My current approach is to build both Debug and Release versions of the dependencies and install them to separate directories. Then I'll need to modify CMake to point to the correct dependency install directory, which I'm currently working on. It's not ideal, but seems to be the easiest solution. I'd certainly love to know if there is a better way to do this in the near term.

As a long term solution, you might look into CMake's fairly recent FetchContent feature. I've used it in small projects before, and it seems to work well. I'm not sure how extensive the required CMake changes would be in order to implement FetchContent in OpenSim.

[aymanhab]

Thanks for chiming in @nathantpickle
When configuring the dependecies project and trying to build Debug, the Configure succeeds but build fails for ipopt since it's not expecting Debug configuration and has baked in release headers/flags. At this point you need to go back to CMake and by trial and error figure out if there's a closure/subset of libraries that can be built debuggable. Excluding the list above (adloc, casadi, colpack, eigen, ipopt ) summarizes what I found out works so that I can build opensim-core Debuggable stack. If you're using OpenSim 4.3 or master and you see different behavior please let us know.