ICU – the international components for unicode is a very usefull library if you’re working with unicode and/or internationalization issues.

It offers all kinds of hard to work out yourself stuff – but one thing thats is a bit difficult is to the the download to build on windows x64 (vc8); as the .sln file only has 32 bits targets …

Sure, there’s a rather difficult approach with cygwin/bash/nmake/cl (have auteconf create makefiles and call m$ nmake + cl as the compiler), but even when you got sofar as the having compiled and linked the libs – you then are faced with incompatibilities: the .def and importlibs for the dlls are wrong.

The solution is really simple.

Just open the .sln file and change the targets from 32 bit to 64 bit.

This will work: libs are correct and you will get good working exe’s.

Settings:

As we expand the set of platforms and compilers one of our clients targets, we came across a small problem: the default bjam msvc settings file (for m$ vc8) did not work on x64 …

No exe’s.

What to do?

Luckily, there’s a howto on the web – a settings jam file with just the right settings to get it all to work, you can find it here

We used it as a drop in and the exe’s came rolling out …

1. create a file as ‘msvc-x64.jam’ (or any name you like)
2. copy the contents of the website into it
3. move it to you jam dir (boost\tools\build\v2\tools)

Then you can do:

 bjam --toolset=msvc-x64 

That’s all …