Using OpenMP 3/4 in Visual Studio 2017

Question

Trying to use features from OpenMP 3

#pragma omp parallel for collapse(2)

It seems Visual Studio 2017 only supports OpenMP2. In a request to support OpenMP4.5 it was said from VS team

We have no plans at this time.

Another answer said

Fortunately clang-cl has become a viable alternative with OpenMP 4 support. In the worst case you can still enable the /fallback option.

How to use clang-cl with Visual Studio 2017 and what is the fallback option?

You can use the Intel compiler on Windows. clang-cl is probably Clang on Windows. You can also use GCC on Windows. Basically, they are telling you to use another compiler that supports OpenMP on Windows. Visual Studio serves only as an IDE in that case. cl is the command line name for the Visual-C++ compiler. — Z boson
– Z boson, Commented Apr 10, 2017 at 11:46

Trass3r · Accepted Answer · 2019-05-20 18:59:55Z

2

Update: The integration has been improved and you can now even install it via the VS installer. Also they are working on /MP support.

You may obtain clang-cl from http://llvm.org/builds/

But you may run into integration issues starting with VS2017:

/fallback is a clang-cl option which makes it fall back to Microsoft's compiler if it can't compile something itself.

answered Jan 10, 2018 at 22:11

Trass3r

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1 Comment

LLVM/Clang can now be trivially enabled in VS via marketplace.visualstudio.com/… extension.