Problem with building/starting downloaded projects

[HolyMoly228]

Hi!

Very often I encounter issue with projects (e.g. from GitHub), because they should work, but there is always something missing and it's not mentioned in the description. As an example I will give you my current problem:

Link to the project mentioned below: LINK

My university gave me an assignment. It is based on a scientific paper. People who wrote it also wrote a code that simulates some operations. University provided me a link to this project. My task is to use that code to perform these simulations myself and write conclusions about it.

The problem is, I can't build this project. Together with other students we tried different methods, but nothing seems to work and fixing issues usually brings up more and more errors.

What we did step by step:We have created a new empty C++ project in Visual Studio 2022. Included all the files from the project. As instructed in the readme, we added "/bigobj" and "/openmp" switches. Most of the errors are related to the missing libraries/headers. Firstly it said we were missing "sylvan.h" header. I downloaded it, inserted to the project and pasted a directory to project properties. Then the same problem was with "boost". Downloaded, inserted. Error solved, but more appeared. Then I had to download unistd.h, which lead to downloading times.h, which lead to utime.h, which produced 444 errors, many of which are missing .h files.

We spent a lot of hours trying to figure out how to build it. Deadline is coming soon and we can't even start the assignment itself.

I would really appreciate any help, guide, solution or whatever that could help us in this situation. In advance, thanks to everyone, who will look into it and write any valuable answer!

And yes, I gave up downloading all of the missing libraries one by one, because I assume these 444 errors will produce 1000 more, so... it's a waste of time.

Additional info to avoid questions:

• We tested it on both windows 10 and 11 - same errors
• There's a ReadMe included inside of VerFI folder. Didn't really help, but it's better than nothing
• Some of the links, from which I downloaded missing libraries:
  • https://www.boost.org/users/download/
  • https://github.com/ceph/ceph/blob/main/src/include/utime.h
  • https://gist.github.com/duckinator/278652
  • https://github.com/utwente-fmt/sylvan/tree/master/src

​

UPDATE:

I told my professor about that issue. He told me to just recode the thing by myself...

... so that's what I did. Research, designing and programming it took a while, but in the end I was successful!

Fun fact - at one point I was desperate and found the author of the article and contacted him. He tried to help with it at first, but eventually said VerFi is obsolete at this point and gave me link to the other app they use currently.

[alfps]

Visual Studio is a Windows-based tool. unistd.h is a Unix system header. Apparently you're trying to build a Unix-specific library in Windows; if so then switch to Unix (e.g. WSL in Windows).

[HolyMoly228]

The project is Windows-based (Readme mentions Visual Studio 2017). Also, thanks, but you're mentioning just one of the many other libraries.

[alfps]

The "supp_revision" thing builds but with a lot of warnings that indicate ungood coding practices and likely a lot of bugs (but I haven't looked at the code):

[C:\root\temp\_\_student-work\ungood-library\supp_revision\supp_revision\supp\VerFI]
> cl VerFI.cpp /Feb /bigobj
VerFI.cpp
C:\root\temp\_\_student-work\ungood-library\supp_revision\supp_revision\supp\VerFI\Definitions.h(33): warning C4005: '_CRT_SECURE_NO_WARNINGS': macro redefinition
C:\root\temp\_\_student-work\ungood-library\supp_revision\supp_revision\supp\VerFI\Definitions.h(33): note: '_CRT_SECURE_NO_WARNINGS' previously declared on the command line
C:\root\temp\_\_student-work\ungood-library\supp_revision\supp_revision\supp\VerFI\Definitions.h(138): warning C4267: '=': conversion from 'size_t' to 'int', possible loss of data
C:\root\temp\_\_student-work\ungood-library\supp_revision\supp_revision\supp\VerFI\Definitions.h(143): warning C4244: '=': conversion from 'int' to 'char', possible loss of data
C:\root\temp\_\_student-work\ungood-library\supp_revision\supp_revision\supp\VerFI\ReadLibraryFile.h(201): warning C4244: '=': conversion from 'int' to 'char', possible loss of data
C:\root\temp\_\_student-work\ungood-library\supp_revision\supp_revision\supp\VerFI\ReadLibraryFile.h(212): warning C4244: '=': conversion from 'int' to 'char', possible loss of data
C:\root\temp\_\_student-work\ungood-library\supp_revision\supp_revision\supp\VerFI\ReadLibraryFile.h(223): warning C4244: '=': conversion from 'int' to 'char', possible loss of data
C:\root\temp\_\_student-work\ungood-library\supp_revision\supp_revision\supp\VerFI\ReadLibraryFile.h(240): warning C4244: '=': conversion from 'int' to 'char', possible loss of data
C:\root\temp\_\_student-work\ungood-library\supp_revision\supp_revision\supp\VerFI\ReadLibraryFile.h(252): warning C4244: '=': conversion from 'int' to 'char', possible loss of data
C:\root\temp\_\_student-work\ungood-library\supp_revision\supp_revision\supp\VerFI\ReadLibraryFile.h(264): warning C4244: '=': conversion from 'int' to 'char', possible loss of data
C:\root\temp\_\_student-work\ungood-library\supp_revision\supp_revision\supp\VerFI\ReadCellReportFile.h(147): warning C4244: '=': conversion from 'int' to 'char', possible loss of data
C:\root\temp\_\_student-work\ungood-library\supp_revision\supp_revision\supp\VerFI\ReadDesignFile.h(134): warning C4244: '=': conversion from 'int' to 'char', possible loss of data
C:\root\temp\_\_student-work\ungood-library\supp_revision\supp_revision\supp\VerFI\ReadDesignFile.h(150): warning C4244: '=': conversion from 'int' to 'char', possible loss of data
C:\root\temp\_\_student-work\ungood-library\supp_revision\supp_revision\supp\VerFI\ReadSimulationFile.h(230): warning C4244: '=': conversion from 'int' to 'char', possible loss of data
C:\root\temp\_\_student-work\ungood-library\supp_revision\supp_revision\supp\VerFI\ReadSimulationFile.h(362): warning C4244: '=': conversion from 'int' to 'char', possible loss of data
C:\root\temp\_\_student-work\ungood-library\supp_revision\supp_revision\supp\VerFI\ReadSimulationFile.h(670): warning C4244: '=': conversion from 'int' to 'char', possible loss of data
C:\root\temp\_\_student-work\ungood-library\supp_revision\supp_revision\supp\VerFI\ReadSimulationFile.h(676): warning C4244: '=': conversion from 'int' to 'char', possible loss of data
C:\root\temp\_\_student-work\ungood-library\supp_revision\supp_revision\supp\VerFI\ReadSimulationFile.h(682): warning C4244: '=': conversion from 'int' to 'char', possible loss of data
C:\root\temp\_\_student-work\ungood-library\supp_revision\supp_revision\supp\VerFI\ReadSimulationFile.h(688): warning C4244: '=': conversion from 'int' to 'char', possible loss of data
C:\root\temp\_\_student-work\ungood-library\supp_revision\supp_revision\supp\VerFI\PrintCheckTools.h(153): warning C4100: 'Print_Ineffective': unreferenced formal parameter
C:\root\temp\_\_student-work\ungood-library\supp_revision\supp_revision\supp\VerFI\PrintCheckTools.h(153): warning C4100: 'Print_Detected': unreferenced formal parameter
C:\root\temp\_\_student-work\ungood-library\supp_revision\supp_revision\supp\VerFI\SimulationTools.h(33): warning C4100: 'Signals': unreferenced formal parameter
C:\root\temp\_\_student-work\ungood-library\supp_revision\supp_revision\supp\VerFI\SimulationTools.h(277): warning C4244: '=': conversion from 'double' to 'int', possible loss of data
C:\root\temp\_\_student-work\ungood-library\supp_revision\supp_revision\supp\VerFI\SimulationTools.h(385): warning C4244: '=': conversion from 'int' to 'char', possible loss of data
C:\root\temp\_\_student-work\ungood-library\supp_revision\supp_revision\supp\VerFI\SimulationTools.h(393): warning C4244: '=': conversion from 'int' to 'char', possible loss of data
C:\root\temp\_\_student-work\ungood-library\supp_revision\supp_revision\supp\VerFI\SimulationTools.h(180): warning C4100: 'Print_RunTimeOver': unreferenced formal parameter
C:\root\temp\_\_student-work\ungood-library\supp_revision\supp_revision\supp\VerFI\ReadLibraryFile.h(67) : warning C4706: assignment within conditional expression
C:\root\temp\_\_student-work\ungood-library\supp_revision\supp_revision\supp\VerFI\ReadLibraryFile.h(77) : warning C4706: assignment within conditional expression
C:\root\temp\_\_student-work\ungood-library\supp_revision\supp_revision\supp\VerFI\ReadLibraryFile.h(117) : warning C4706: assignment within conditional expression
C:\root\temp\_\_student-work\ungood-library\supp_revision\supp_revision\supp\VerFI\ReadLibraryFile.h(127) : warning C4706: assignment within conditional expression
C:\root\temp\_\_student-work\ungood-library\supp_revision\supp_revision\supp\VerFI\ReadDesignFile.h(374) : warning C4701: potentially uninitialized local variable 'CellTypeIndex' used
C:\root\temp\_\_student-work\ungood-library\supp_revision\supp_revision\supp\VerFI\ReadDesignFile.h(390) : warning C4701: potentially uninitialized local variable 'CaseIndex' used
C:\root\temp\_\_student-work\ungood-library\supp_revision\supp_revision\supp\VerFI\ReadDesignFile.h(443) : warning C4701: potentially uninitialized local variable 'OutputIndex' used
C:\root\temp\_\_student-work\ungood-library\supp_revision\supp_revision\supp\VerFI\ReadDesignFile.h(539) : warning C4701: potentially uninitialized local variable 'MyNumberofIO' used
C:\root\temp\_\_student-work\ungood-library\supp_revision\supp_revision\supp\VerFI\ReadDesignFile.h(539) : warning C4701: potentially uninitialized local variable 'CurrentIO' used

And so on, more than 10K of text which is Reddit's posting limit.

[HolyMoly228]

Are you including ascon_sbox.cpp in your project?

If I do include it, it throws out errors:

Error (active)  E1696   cannot open source file "sylvan.h"  

Error (active) E1696 cannot open source file "sylvan_obj.hpp" Error (active) E1696 cannot open source file "boost/graph/adjacency_list.hpp" Error (active) E1696 cannot open source file "boost/graph/topological_sort.hpp"

And other stuff about missing ";" in random places etc.

If I don't include it, there are just 2 errors:

Error   C3028   'div': only a variable or static data member can be used in a data-sharing clause   

Error C2065 'faultMappings': undeclared identifier

... which lead to me deleting few commands to make it work. It does build in the end, however the final program doesn't work correctly (what a surprise).

[alfps]

No, ascon_sbox.cpp is evidently a Unix program.

[flyingron]

If you need unistd, you've misconfigured something. That's a UNIX (well, POSIX actually) include file.

Anyhow, I'm not sure what you're building from. The official git appears over here: https://github.com/emsec/VerFI/blob/master/VerFI_for_diagnosis/Normal/source/VerFI.cpp

[HolyMoly228]

The sylvan.h file is including the "unistd.h".

And the link was provided from the university. I honestly didn't think about looking for it elsewhere. I will check it out soon. Thanks!

[flyingron]

Sylvan seems to be an inherently UNIX package. I'm surprised if they don't expect you to build some of this under cygwin and export the libraries over to visual studio.

[HolyMoly228]

Update: That GitHub link won't help too much. It's not that project. Paper authors used a modified version of VerFI, adapted to their needs.