Community feedback required: What OS, Dev Tools, CMake, Compiler, Vulkan and glsang etc. versions do use?

[robertosfield]

Hi All,

I am look for feedback from the community on the development platforms/tools/dependencies that you all use. I need to broadest picture for what the community require support for, and if you have older development platforms/tools that are close to end of supported life we need to discuss ways to make migration to supported tools/dependencies as seamless as we can.

During the development of long lived software project there is always some tension between retaining support for older platforms/tools/dependencies and implementing new features, or cleaning up implementations/tooling using newer features of tools & dependencies. At one extreme we could keep chasing latest features and ignore the needs of users that can't upgrade to these latest tools, at the other we can hold development back to just support the oldest versions of platforms/tools/dependencies but then end up unable to support modern platforms/tools/dependencies.

With understanding where the community is at we can weigh up the pros/cons of moving to more recent feature set and dropping old platforms/tools/dependencies that few or no developers still use.

For instance PR #1624 provides a slightly cleaner way to pull in the VSG as a dependency but requires CMake 3.8 or later, while the present required CMake version is 3.7, which was required for older Linux distros. However, if no uses older distros then we can just set an oldest version we target and update to the version CMake it has. Same goes for all the other tools.

---

Could you give be feedback on platforms and version combinations that you need:

1. OS
2. CMake
3. Compilers
4. Vulkan
5. glslang
6. assimp
7. KTX
8. GDAL

Any other platforms/tools I haven't mentioned but you feel is important to your project let me know. Thanks for your input.

---

As starter, these are what I have access to day to day:

1. Kunbutu 22.04 & Windows 11
2. CMake 3.28.3
3. gcc 13.3.0 & clang 18.1.3
4. Vulkan 1.3.290
5. glsang 11:15.1.0
6. assimp 5.3
7. KTX 4.4.2
8. GDAL 3.8.4

[AnyOldName3]

As I mainly use Windows, I generally have access to releases of tools and SDKs the moment they exist, and as I don't use vcpkg as my first port of call, I generally have access to tip-of-tree builds of libraries just as easily as releases.

For MSYS2, things tend to keep pace with Arch Linux, so always have newer versions of everything than you'll have on an Ubuntu-based distro.

As I know some VSG users do get all their dependencies from vcpkg, I'll mention that the versions of everything that currently makes available are:

• Vulkan headers 1.4.309.0
• glslang 15.1.0
• assimp 6.0.2
• KTX 4.3.2
• GDAL 3.11.1

That doesn't necessarily mean that everyone who uses vcpkg will have these versions, e.g. they might be using an older baseline commit. In theory, if they need a specific version of another library from vcpkg, they can generally update the baseline commit while specifying a specific version for just the one library, but sometimes that's a little flaky as obviously they don't test every possible permutation of thousands of libraries in CI.

[simwangrui]

Hi,
This is my development environment：

OS: Windows7,Windows10,Windows11
CMake: 3.31.4
Compilers: VS2022
Vulkan: 1.4.304.0
glslang: 15.1.0
assimp: 6.0.2
KTX:
GDAL:

[maisvendoo]

Hi!
OS: Windows 10
CMake: 4.0.0
Compiler: mingw 13.1.0 64-bit for C/C++
Vulkan: 1.4.309
glslang: 15.1.0
assimp: 5.4.3
freetype: 2.13.3

OS: Linux (Arch Linux). All dependencies are from repository and have lastest versions

[reedev]

Hi all!

In general, I build and use a lot from source, Jetson Nano capabilities are leading for me.

Platform: Jetson Nano
OS: Ubuntu 18.04 (NVIDIA does not support newer version)
CMake: 3.31.5 (built from source)
Compilers: gcc 11.4.0
Vulkan: Vulkan Instance Version: 1.2.70, apiVersion = 1.2.131
glslang: 15.2.0 (built from source)
assimp: 6.0.2 / master (built from source)
KTX:
GDAL: 3.10.2 (built from source)

Platform: x86_64 (desktop)
OS: Debian 13
CMake: 3.31.6
Compilers: gcc 14.2.0
Vulkan: Vulkan Instance Version: 1.4.309, apiVersion = 1.4.305
glslang: 15.2.0 (built from source to sync with Jetson Nano)
assimp: 6.0.2 / master (built from source to sync with Jetson Nano)
KTX:
GDAL: 3.10.3

Platform: x86_64 (VM)
OS: Debian 14 - for testing mostly
CMake: 3.31.6
Compilers: gcc 15.2.0
Vulkan: Vulkan Instance Version: 1.4.328, apiVersion = 1.4.318
glslang: 15.2.0 (built from source to sync with Jetson Nano)
assimp: master (built from source, must use master due to compiler errors)
KTX:
GDAL: 3.12.0

Platform: x86_64 (laptop)
OS: Ubuntu 24.04
CMake: 3.28.3
Compilers: gcc 13.3.0
Vulkan: Vulkan Instance Version: 1.3.275, apiVersion = 1.4.305 (Intel), 1.4.305 (NVIDIA)
glslang: 15.2.0 (built from source to sync with Jetson Nano)
assimp: 6.0.2 / master (built from source to sync with Jetson Nano)
KTX:
GDAL: 3.8.4

Platform: x86_64 (laptop)
OS: Windows 11
CMake: 3.30.4
Compilers: Visual Studio 2022
Vulkan: Vulkan Instance Version: 1.4.304, apiVersion = 1.2.170 (Intel), 1.3.260 (NVIDIA)
glslang: 15.2.0 (built from source to sync with Jetson Nano)
assimp: 6.0.2 / master (built from source to sync with Jetson Nano)
KTX:
GDAL: 2.4.2 (built from source)

Platform: raspberry pi 4
OS: Debian 13 (Raspberry Pi OS)
CMake: 3.25.1
Compilers: gcc 14.2.0
Vulkan: Vulkan Instance Version: 1.4.309, apiVersion = 1.2.289
glslang: 15.2.0 (built from source to sync with Jetson Nano)
assimp: 6.0.2 / master (built from source to sync with Jetson Nano)
KTX:
GDAL: 3.6.2

[AnyOldName3]

You shouldn't even need to build CMake yourself to get a newer version on Ubuntu 18.04, as PPAs like https://code.launchpad.net/~ecal/+archive/ubuntu/cmake-3.25 have backports of newer versions, and Kitware themselves provide generic Linux builds of the latest (and older) version for aarch64 and x86_64 here https://cmake.org/download/.

[reedev]

I looked it up and what I do is:

• use standard cmake (3.10.2) to build and install cmake v3.22.6
• use cmake v3.22.6 to build and install cmake v3.31.5

[reedev]

Sure, if you go that way with other PPAs, you might also want to say that Ubuntu 20.04 would be possible on Jetson Nano. Been there, done it, unstable and not supported by NVIDIA. And in such cases I prefer to build from source, much more flexible for my purpose.

On the other hand, I need to be fair since I do use a different ppa for installing gcc... It's also grown like that over the years.

[AnyOldName3]

There's a pretty big difference between installing a backport of a single tool via a PPA (especially something like CMake that drivers wouldn't interact with) and changing the version of nearly everything by changing the whole Ubuntu release.

I'm a little surprised that Ubuntu's overridden Debian's backport policy to make build tools like compilers and CMake ineligible for the official backports repo, forcing people to use PPAs. Debian's backport repos always have a much newer version of CMake available than the base distribution.

[reedev]

Ok, interesting, I am not so familiar with the backport capabilities. In that sense I am just an ordinary user. Thanks for sharing.

[Vic-Min]

OS: Win10
CMake: 3.31
Compilers: VS2022
Vulkan: 1.3.243
glslang: 15.1.0
assimp: 6.0.2
KTX
GDAL: 3.6.3

OS: Debian 12 derivative
CMake: 3.25
Compilers: gcc 12.2
Vulkan: 1.3.239
glslang: 15.0.0
assimp: 5.2.5
KTX
GDAL: 3.6.2

[FrancoisBerard]

Hi!

*** Dev platform:
OS: MacOS 15.7.2
CMake: 4.0.2 (CLion's built-in) 3.31.7 (when building from command line, mac ports package)
Compiler: Apple clang version 17.0.0 (clang-1700.0.13.3)
Vulkan: 1.4.38.1 (MoltenVK 1.4.0)
glsang: 11:16.0.0
assimp: 6.0.2
KTX: -
GDAL: -

*** run platform:
OS: Lubuntu 22.04.3
CMake: 3.28.3
Compiler: gcc 13.3.0
Vulkan: 1.4.313
glsang: 11:15.3.0
assimp: 6.0.2
KTX: -
GDAL: -

[rolandhill]

Hi All,

Dev
OS: Kubuntu 25.10/24.04
CMake: 3.31.6
Compilers: GCC 15.2
Vulkan: 1.4.328.1
glslang: 11.16
assimp: 5.1.6
GDAL: 3.12.0 (compile from source. I call GDAL a lot myself, not just through vsgXchange)
vsgImgui: Essential for user interface
SOCI
PROJ

Targets
OS: Win11, in the future MacOS & Linux Flatpak
Compilers: VS2022

[AnyOldName3]

There was a commit bumping the CMake version from 3.7 to 3.10 yesterday, and as I didn't see a post confirming that anyone had checked the CMake policies that doing that would change, I've just done so myself. It's CMP0067 to CMP0071, and none of them look relevant to the VSG, so everything should be fine.