Dear all,
I am very eager to use openFAST, but I have a few questions regarding the use and compilation of openFAST. Although I have an engineering background, I do not have a lot of experience with software development and compiling code. My questions may therefore seem silly, but perhaps others with a similar background as me also struggle a bit with the same questions, so I will ask them anyway.
I recently spend quite some time trying to compile openFAST, using Visual Studio 2019 and Visual Fortran 2017. I tried to compile on multiple computers (my private desktop as well as corporate machines) and although following each time the instructions laid out on [url]https://openfast.readthedocs.io/en/master/[/url], I got different type of errors on each machine. I started issue [url]https://github.com/OpenFAST/openfast/issues/336[/url] on github with one of the errors I obtained, and Rafael advised me to simply download the binaries of the latest release.
The way I understand it, is that I download these files and are now able to run openFAST. Is this understanding correct? Or do i have to merge these files with those in the GitHub master branch somehow?
If I had known about these pre-compiled binaries I would not have spend so much time trying to compile openFAST. Yet, I get the impression that the vast majority of the users is compiling openFAST themselves. Which leaves me to wonder whether I miss something here? Are there clear benefits to compiling the code myself or is it even a requirement to correctly use openFAST? I get that if I am planning on altering or adding to the code, I have to compile, but if am planning on using the existing modules there is actually no need to compile right?
Hope someone can clear this up for me!