Building Open3D on Windows seems impossible

[patrikhuber]

Hi,

Building Open3D on Windows with CUDA and a fairly recent MSVC version seems impossible, there are a variety of build issues. A few points:

• A more or less recent-ish CUDA version is needed, for example CUDA 12.3 and earlier don't work anymore with any MSVC >=14.40.
• Using the latest Open3D main and MSVC 14.40, 14.41 or 14.42, and any CUDA version (e.g. 12.5 or 12.6), fails with an is_proxy_reference error, see here Building failed when Windows 11 + CUDA 12.5 + MSVC 19.41 + CMake 3.29.4 + "STDGPU_BACKEND=STDGPU_BACKEND_CUDA" stotko/stdgpu#417. People in that issue say that this error happens on Ubuntu too.
• Using the latest stdgpu main compiles fine on MSVC >=14.40 and CUDA 12.6. But then using Open3D with USE_SYSTEM_STDGPU=ON and pointing it to that latest stdgpu fails with a variety of errors. Replacing thrust::pair with stdgpu::pair as suggested here stdgpu target fails the CMake configure step with CUDA 12.4 due to changes in Thrust version header #6743 (comment) results in more errors somewhere deep in Open3D's CUDA implementations.

In summary, it seems impossible to build Open3D with a somewhat recent MSVC and CUDA version, which is a very bad state of affairs, and it's been like that for almost a year now. And no one of the maintainers that might be familiar with those pieces seems to have any interest or time to fix things or even respond to issues.

Has anyone built Open3D with a somewhat recent MSVC and CUDA version on Windows? Are there no Windows users?

/CC @stotko, you are the only one that responds to issues and tries to help fix things, but I think you're the stdgpu author, and not open3d maintainer. Still, do you have any way to help perhaps?

[stotko]

Hi,

as you correctly pointed out, I'm the author and maintainer of stdgpu. I also worked and contributed to Open3D in the past but I'm not a maintainer of it. Nonetheless since Open3D is one of stdgpu's main users, I of course have some interest in fixing things on our side.

Since I mainly develop under Ubuntu, I typically rely on the CI to detect any issues on Windows which however worked quite well so far. Regarding your points:

• I observed this behavior as well in another project of mine. MSVC recently bumped the minimum required CUDA version to 12.4, see Toolset update: VS 2022 17.10 Preview 2, WinSDK 22621, CUDA 12.4.0 microsoft/STL#4475.
• The issue with is_proxy_reference has been fixed upstream in stdgpu. However, the fix required bumping the minimum thrust version to 1.13.1 (CUDA 11.5) as it built upon a thrust macro that has been introduced in this version. Unfortunately, Open3D still relies on an older version of stdgpu, presumably to maintain backward compatibility with very old CUDA versions/GPUs, see

  Open3D/3rdparty/stdgpu/stdgpu.cmake

  Line 10 in 9d0cfc8

  # Jun 20 2024. Later versions need CUDA 11.5 and an API update (stdgpu::pair)

• Glad to hear that the latest stdgpu version works. Why things fail again with USE_SYSTEM_STDGPU=ON or stdgpu::pair is strange though. I noticed that enabling the contract checks leads to weird CUDA errors deep within the reduce implementation of thrust/CUB. Do the same errors occur when the external/system stdgpu was built with STDGPU_ENABLE_CONTRACT_CHECKS=OFF?