Use libcaffe externally about caffe

[dtmoodie]

I'm working on a version of caffe with proper dll exports.
https://github.com/dtmoodie/caffe
I can't get the test suite to run because of cuda linking issues, but so far it works correctly in my external applications.

[sasagalic-MSFT]

Already reported in #45. Currently there is no way to workaround linking issue without modifying code but the one you described.
One option would be to add Caffe dll project to be used by external clients but that would require defining proper interface. Do you think this would be viable solution?

[d4nst]

I thought about this too. It could be a solution, but it doesn't seem very clean either.

[sasagalic-MSFT]

@danst18, why do you say that it would not be a clean solution? With dll proper interface can be defined (I would say just forward logic should be exposed since external clients have no interest in training part). Also, external clients would be freed from linking Caffe dependencies and would not be affected by changes in Caffe implementation.
Let me know your thinking.

[d4nst]

Ok. I was thinking that it would be necessary to change the interface when Caffe changes, but this wouldn't be necessary actually, so I think it is a good solution 👍 Sorry for the confusion.

[pavlejosipovic]

@danst18 if the original issue is resolved, please close it.

[d4nst]

@sasagalic-MSFT proposed a solution for this but as far as I know this has not been implemented yet, so the issue still persists

[dashesy]

@dtmoodie other than DLL export is there anything else needed to export the symbols?

[dtmoodie]

If I remember correctly, https://github.com/dtmoodie/caffe/blob/master/include/caffe/proto/caffe_pb.h is important to correctly export protobuf classes. Basically you can tell protobuf to add export decorations, but you need to actually define the export decorations somewhere. Thus I created caffe_pb.h which includes caffe.pb.h and changed everything to include caffe_pb.h instead of caffe.pb.h.