I've been following the guide and I just can't figure out what's going wrong...

http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_57_0/more/getting_started/windows.html

I seem to need to build the binaries for date_time, so I open the command prompt and go to the boost root directory, then type bootstrap, but I get a message saying:

'yacc' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

Failed to build Boost.Build engine.

Then it gives a sourceforge message for prebuilt binaries, but before I try that... anyone have any ideas what's wrong? Isn't yacc a Unix compiler? I definitely downloaded a Windows archive... but I don't know how these things work. The Boost documentation doesn't seem to be great with this.

EDIT: I also only actually need to use date_time, so if I can avoid building everything (I see the precompiled binaries take up over 3GB...) then that would be great.

I've also seen this:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2364774/why-do-i-need-to-compile-datetime-in-boost-if-i-am-not-using-to-string-or-from-s

But when I use #define BOOST_ALL_NO_LIB, I get another error:

1>c:\program files (x86)\boost\boost_1_57_0\boost\smart_ptr\detail\yield_k.hpp(28) : fatal error C1083: Cannot open include file: 'boost/predef.h': No such file or directory

Absolutely no idea at this point...

Aren't you supposed to type "bootstrap.bat msvc"?

Building boost is a little complicated for me personally. This is how I normally go about doing it: (notes I made for myself the last time I compiled boost. It was version 1.56)

First go to: ".\tools\build\v2\engine\"
Excute: "built.bat mingw" from the command line.
Go to ".\tools\build\v2\engine\bin.ntx86\" and copy b2.exe and bjam.exe to ".\" (the root boost directory)

Then call: "b2 --layout=tagged toolset=gcc threading=multi link=shared variant=debug,release address-model=32" from the commandline.

It's the steps bootstrap.bat normally takes for you, but I ran into errors with bootstrap.bat in the past that I couldn't figure out, so that's why I went about it differently.

Since you are using Visual Studio, you'd probably need to do "built.bat msvc" in the second line, and "toolset=msvc" in the fourth line (just guessing!). The fourth line can also be modified to suite your tastes in how the libraries are compiled and named.

It usually takes some mucking around before I can get Boost compiled. Best of luck!

PS: It takes an hour or more to compile. You can specify just the libraries you want to build, if you don't want to compile the whole shebang.

Aren't you supposed to type "bootstrap.bat msvc"?

Well the documentation didn't mention anything about that... so I wouldn't be surprised if that was exactly what I was meant to do, frankly

Thanks for the info... will try all that tomorrow morning and see how I manage. Can't bear to try again this late after so much frustration, and I'd probably make a mistake somewhere in the long process.

This is the kind of thing that makes me entirely rethink my decision to make games in C++...

Hmm... well I decided to download Boost again, this time using the .zip instead of the recommended .7z, and now the bootstrap command is working as well as apparently the gregorian class that wouldn't work before. So hopefully I'll be able to get by without needing any binaries at all. Can't see where I could have messed anything up when I extracted to the desktop... but perhaps I did without realizing.

Seems to be working now at least...

The biggest pain - if you're using Visual Studio - is to make sure that cl.exe and the other build tools are in your PATH. The easiest way to do that is to open up Visual Studio and go to Tools -> Visual Studio Command Prompt.

Yeah, I wasn't sure about the difference between the ordinary command prompt and the VS one, but I was still getting the same results with both before.

I'll make a note of those commands in case I need them later, thanks...

BTW, is it easy to make it so it just builds a specific library? Or might it just be easier to have it do both and wait for it to finish?