Smooth Installation of mumax+

[Inconspicuous11]

TLDR: Visual Studio 2022 build, v 17.xx, CUDA v 12.5 and Python v 3.11 are required for installing mumax+. These requirements may be specific for the NVIDIA RTX A5000.

While installing mumax+ on a PC with an NVIDIA A5000, we ran into several errors, with the most prominent being a 'failed-wheel-build-for-install'. The problem lay in the incompatible versions of the different software that are expected to be installed.

1. Visual Studio Version: The most easily available version of VS was the latest 2026 insiders build. The install was not successful and we switched to the 2022 build, which is not available for download on the Microsoft website. This was sourced through some searches online. After the C++ version was installed, we moved onto the next problem.
2. CUDA version: The CUDA version which worked for us was the CUDA 12.5 version found at https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-12-5-0-download-archive#. Other versions (13.0, 12.1) did not work
3. Python version: 3.11 is the one that gave us results. 3.10 and 3.13 did not work.

Of course, if there are some obvious missteps from our side please let me know, but we believe this information would help anyone installing the software in the future.

[JonathanMaes]

Thanks for reporting the hiccups you experienced during installation! These version incompatibilities can indeed be quite a mess.

1. CUDA doesn't seem to support MSVC 2026 yet, so we can only wait for a CUDA version that does, indeed using an older MSVC in the meantime. I will clarify this interplay between CUDA and MSVC in the README.
2. A fix for an issue with CUDA 13.0 on Windows is underway in Fix #104: Look for DLLs in /x64 sudirectory #116, though other errors are likely to occur. One possible recommendation is to use the "Developer PowerShell for VS 2022" instead of the regular command prompt during compilation: for me, at least, this solved all errors CUDA threw at me. It is strange that 12.1 doesn't work for you while 12.5 does, I can't think of any obvious version incompatibility there.
3. Recent mumax+ updates indeed make use of syntactical features only included in Python 3.11, but the README still erroneously states Python 3.8 or higher is needed. I will update this. It is very curious, however, that 3.13 does not work: do you still know what error occurred there?