Platform Specific Notes

This section contains some installation notes that are platform specific under UNIX.

• Solaris SPARC 64bit: You cannot install (or build) the 64 bit version of SICStus using gcc 2.x. You need to use the Sun Workshop/Forte compiler, version 5.0 or later. InstallSICStus will try to find it during installation but if that fails, you can set the environment variable CC to e.g. /opt/SUNWspro/bin/cc before invoking InstallSICStus. Using gcc 3.x does seem to work but has not yet received much testing. To install with gcc 3.x, set the environment variable CC appropriately before invoking InstallSICStus.
• Solaris SPARC 64bit: The following libraries are not supported: library(bdb), library(tcltk).
• Solaris Library timeout does not work with Java. The problems seems to be a limitation in the Solaris setitimer for process with multiple threads. A possible workaround on Solaris 8 is to use an alternative thread library by setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH to /usr/lib/lwp. This alternative thread library is not available prior to Solaris 8 and it is the default in Solaris 9.
• MacOS X: Installing and using library(tcltk) requires Tk, which is not installed on MacOS X by default (see Tcl/Tk Notes).
• MacOS X: An executable built with spld will only work if there is a properly configured subdirectory sp-3.11.1 in the same directory as the executable; see Runtime Systems on UNIX Target Machines.

  Alternatively, the option --wrapper can be passed to spld. In this case a wrapper script is created that will set up various environment variables and invoke the real executable.

• MacOS X: It is not possible to prelink dynamic foreign resources into a dynamically linked Prolog executable. That is, except for data resources, spld --resources ... does not work, whereas spld --static --resources ... will. This is no great loss; pre-linking dynamic foreign resources is pointless, at best.
• MacOS X: When using third-party products like BDB, you may need to set up DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH so that the MacOS X dynamic linker can find them. When using the SICStus development executable (sicstus), a wrapper script does this automatically.
• MacOS X: File names are encoded in UTF-8 on MacOS X. This is handled correctly by SICStus. If SICStus encounters a file name that is not encoded in UTF-8, it will interpret the name as Latin 1 (ISO 8859/1) instead. This can happen on file systems where files have been created by some other OS than MacOS X, e.g. on network file servers accessed by other UNIX flavors or Windows.
• MacOS X: Sometimes, the default limit on the process's data-segment is unreasonably small, which may lead to unexpected memory allocation failures. To check this limit, do

            tcsh> limit data
            datasize 	6144 kbytes
            bash> ulimit -d
            6144
            

  This indicates that the maximum size of the data-segment is only 6 Mb. To remove the limit, do

            tcsh> limit datasize unlimited
            datasize 	unlimited
            bash> ulimit -d unlimited
            bash> ulimit -d
            unlimited
            

  Please note: limit (ulimit) is a shell built-in in csh/tcsh (sh/bash). It may have a different name in other shells.

  Please note: The limit will also affect SICStus when started from within Emacs, e.g. with M-x run-prolog. To change the limit used by Emacs and its sub-processes (such as SICStus) you will need to change the limit in the shell used to start Emacs. Alternatively you can create a shell wrapper for the emacs command.

• MacOS X 10.2: When running spld or splfr the Apple linker sometimes issues a warning similar to:

            ld: warning dynamic shared library: ... not made a weak library in
            output with MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET environment variable set to: 10.1
            

  This warning is harmless and can be ignored.

• IRIX spld --moveable implies --wrapper. This is due to limitations in the IRIX run-time loader.
• IRIX Pre-linked dynamic resources will not be found at run-time if the executable was built with spld --moveable. This should not be a problem; pre-linked dynamic resources are not recommended anyway.
• AIX Applications that embed the SICStus run-time need to use the Large Address-Space Model. This is done automatically by spld. If you do not use spld, you need to set this option yourself. This is achieved by linking the executable using the -bmaxdata option. An alternative may be to set the environment variable LDR_CNTRL appropriately. See the documentation for the AIX command ld.
• AIX library(bdb) does not work properly unless Berkeley DB is built like this:

            % make LIBSO_LIBS=-lpthread