3.2 Platform Specific Notes

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

• Solaris SPARC 64-bit: 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 64-bit: 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.
• Mac OS X If you intend to use the Jasper Java interface you need the latest Java development tools. These are downloadable from Apple at http://developer.apple.com/java.

  As an alternative, you can use the pre-built installation. Most easily by using the SICStus Installer Tool or by invoking InstallSICStus with the --all-questions argument.

• Mac OS X: Installing and using library(tcltk) requires Tk, which is not installed on Mac OS X by default (see Tcl/Tk Notes).
• Mac OS X: An executable built with spld will only work if there is a properly configured subdirectory sp-3.12.7 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.

• Mac OS 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.
• Mac OS X: When using third-party products like BDB, you may need to set up DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH so that the Mac OS X dynamic linker can find them. When using the SICStus development executable (sicstus), this should happen automatically.
• Mac OS X: File names are encoded in UTF-8 on Mac OS 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 Mac OS X, e.g. on network file servers accessed by other UNIX flavors or Windows.
• Mac OS 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.

  As of SICStus 3.12.7 SICStus will set the data segment size of itself according to the value of the environment variable SP_ULIMIT_DATA_SEGMENT_SIZE. If you set this variable in the initialization file for your shell you do not have to use the ulimit command.

• Mac OS X: The default character encoding for SICStus is Latin1 (ISO-8859-1) (see WCX Environment Variables). This will come in conflict with the default character encoding for the Terminal application which is UTF-8. A clickable launcher for SICStus is optionally installed in the Applications folder. This launcher will set the character encoding to Latin1 for both the Terminal and SICStus.
• Mac OS X: library(timeout) does not work reliably when MacOS X runs on a multi-CPU machine. In particular, timeouts tend to happen much later than they should. This is caused by an OS bug. One workaround is to disable all but one CPU using the “Processor” control in the “System Preferences” or the hwprefs command. These utilities are part of “CHUD” which can be installed as part of Apple XCode. The underlying bug is related to setitimer(ITIMER_VIRTUAL) and has been observed at least up to Mac OS X 10.4.7 (Darwin 8.7.3).
• Mac OS X The SICStus binaries are not built as universal binaries, and neither spld nor splfr supports building universal binaries. You can however build a universal binary of your SICStus application by running spld from a SICStus PowerPC-installation (this may be done on an Intel-Mac using Rosetta) and running spld from a SICStus Intel-installation, and then joining the two generated binaries with lipo. The following example assumes that your program is in myprog.pl and the paths to your PowerPC-installation and your Intel-installation are SP-i386-BINPATH and SP-PPC-BINPATH respectively.

            $(SP-i386-BINPATH)/sicstus -l myprog.pl --goal "save_program(myprog), halt."
            $(SP-i386-BINPATH)/spld --main=restore myprog.sav -static -o myprog-i386
            $(SP-PPC-BINPATH)/spld --main=restore myprog.sav -static -o myprog-ppc
            lipo myprog-i386 myprog-ppc -create -output myprog
       

  You cannot install a PowerPC-based SICStus on an Intel-Mac with the SICStus Installer Tool. You must unpack the tar file and run the script InstallSICStus with the --all-questions argument. When asked if you want to install the prebuilt version of SICStus, answer “yes”.

• Mac OS X 64-bit Intel The following libraries are not supported: library(bdb), library(tcltk), library(jasper).
• 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