1 THE AMSTERDAM COMPILER KIT V6.1pre1
2 ===================================
4 © 1987-2005 Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam
11 The Amsterdam Compiler Kit is a complete compiler toolchain consisting of
12 front end compilers for a number of different languages, code generators,
13 support libraries, and all the tools necessary to go from source code to
14 executable on any of the platforms it supports.
16 This is an early prerelease of the apocryphal version 6.1 release. Not a
17 lot is supported, the build mechanism needs work, and a lot of things are
18 probably broken. However, what's there should be sufficient to get things
19 done and to evaluate how the full 6.1 release should work.
28 ANSI C, B, Pascal, Modula 2, Basic. K&R is supported via the ANSI C compiler.
32 pc86 produces bootable floppy disk images for 8086 PCs
33 linux386 produces ELF executables for PC Linux systems
34 linux68k produces ELF executables for m68020 Linux systems
35 linuxppc produces ELF executables for PowerPC Linux systems
36 linuxmips produces ELF executables for little-endian MIPS32r2 Linux systems
37 cpm produces i80 CP/M .COM files
38 rpi produces Raspberry Pi GPU binaries
39 pdpv7 produces PDP/11 V7 Unix binaries
46 The version 5.0 build mechanism has been completely rewritten. Installation
47 ought to be fairly straightforward.
51 - an ANSI C compiler. This defaults to gcc. You can change this by setting
58 - (optionally) ninja; if you've got this, this will be autodetected and give
61 - (optionally) the qemu suite: if you have this installed, the build system
62 will detect it automatically and run the test suites for the supported
63 architectures. Get both the qemu-system-* platform emulators and the qemu-*
64 userland emulators (only works on Linux).
66 - about 115MB free in /tmp (or some other temporary directory).
68 - about 15MB in the target directory.
72 - edit the Makefile. There's a small section at the top where you can change
73 the configuration. Probably the only one you may want to edit is PREFIX,
74 which changes where the ACK installs to.
80 ...from the command line. This will do the build.
82 The make system is fully parallelisable. If you have a multicore system,
83 install ninja and it'll use all your cores. If you don't have ninja, you
84 can still use make for parallel builds with:
86 make -r -j8 # or however many cores you have
88 ...but frankly, I recommend ninja.
94 ...from the command line. This will install the ACK in your PREFIX
95 directory (by default, /usr/local).
97 The ACK should now be ready to use.
104 Currently I haven't sorted out all the documentation --- it's supplied in the
105 distribution, but not all of it gets installed yet --- so here is a quickstart
108 The main command to use is 'ack'. This invokes the compiler and the linker.
109 Some useful options include:
111 -m<platform> build for the specified platform
112 -o <file> specifies the output file
114 -c.s produce a .s assembly file
115 -O enable optimisation (optimisation levels go up to 6)
116 -ansi compile ANSI C (when using the C compiler)
117 -v be more verbose (repeatable)
120 ack figures out which language to use from the file extension:
123 .b the PDP-11 dialect of B
130 .e ACK intermediate code assembly files
132 For further information, see the man page (which actually does get
133 installed, but is rather out of date).
135 There are some (known working) example programs in the 'examples' directory.
136 A sample command line is:
138 ack -mlinux386 -O examples/paranoia.c
145 There are some things you should be aware of.
147 - Look at plat/<PLATFORMNAME>/README for information about the supported
150 - The library support is fairly limited; for C, it's at roughly the ANSI C
151 level, and for the other languages it's similar.
153 - When compiling languages other than C, the ACK will usually look at the
154 first character of the file. If it's a #, then the file will be run through
155 the C preprocessor anyway.
157 - BSD systems may need to up the number of file descriptors (e.g.
158 'ulimit -n 200') before the ACK will compile.
160 - The ACK uses its own .o format. You won't be able to mix the ACK's object
161 files and another compiler's.
163 - When compiling together multiple B source files, you need to do some extra
164 work to initialise them properly otherwise your program will crash on
165 startup; see the ack(1) and abmodules(1) man pages.
167 - The distribution contains *everything*, including the weird, ancient,
168 archaic stuff that doesn't work any more and never will, such as the int EM
169 interpreter and the assembler-linkers. Only some of it builds. Look for
177 The ACK is mature, well-tested software, but the environment in which it was
178 developed for and tested under is rather different from that available on
179 today's machines. There will probably be little in the way of logical bugs,
180 but there may be many compilation and API bugs.
182 If you wish to use the ACK, *please* join the mailing list. We are interested
183 in any reports of success and particularly, failure. If it does fail for you,
184 we would love to know why, in as much detail as possible. Bug fixes are even
187 The ACK is licensed under a BSD-like license. Please see the 'Copyright' file
190 You can find the mailing list on the project's web site:
192 http://tack.sourceforge.net/
196 David Given (davidgiven on Github)