THE AMSTERDAM COMPILER KIT V6.1pre1
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              © 1987-2005 Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam
                            2022-08-19

INTRODUCTION

The Amsterdam Compiler Kit is a complete compiler toolchain consisting of front end compilers for a number of different languages, code generators, support libraries, and all the tools necessary to go from source code to executable on any of the platforms it supports.

This is an early prerelease of the apocryphal version 6.1 release. Not a lot is supported, the build mechanism needs work, and a lot of things are probably broken. However, what's there should be sufficient to get things done and to evaluate how the full 6.1 release should work.

SUPPORT

Languages:

ANSI C, B, Pascal, Modula 2, Basic. K&R is supported via the ANSI C compiler.

Platforms:

pc86 produces bootable floppy disk images for 8086 PCs linux386 produces ELF executables for PC Linux systems linux68k produces ELF executables for m68020 Linux systems linuxppc produces ELF executables for PowerPC Linux systems linuxmips produces ELF executables for little-endian MIPS32r2 Linux systems cpm produces i80 CP/M .COM files rpi produces Raspberry Pi GPU binaries pdpv7 produces PDP/11 V7 Unix binaries msdos86 produces i86 MS-DOS .COM files msdos386 produces i386 MS-DOS 32-bit DPMI .EXE files

INSTALLATION

The version 5.0 build mechanism has been completely rewritten. Installation ought to be fairly straightforward. It will build on Unixishes including Linux, OSX, and Windows using MSYS2 and mingw32.

Requirements:

• an ANSI C compiler. This defaults to gcc. You can change this by setting the CC make variable.

• flex and yacc.

• GNU make.

• Lua (any version) with the lua-posix library installed.

• (optionally) ninja; if you've got this, this will be autodetected and give you faster builds.

• about 115MB free in /tmp (or some other temporary directory).

• about 15MB in the target directory.

Instructions:

• edit the Makefile. There's a small section at the top where you can change the configuration. Probably the only one you may want to edit is PREFIX, which changes where the ACK installs to.

• Run:

  make

  ...from the command line. This will do the build.

  The make system is fully parallelisable. If you have a multicore system, install ninja and it'll use all your cores. If you don't have ninja, you can still use make for parallel builds with:

  make -r -j8 # or however many cores you have

  ...but frankly, I recommend ninja.

• Run:

  sudo make install

  ...from the command line. This will install the ACK in your PREFIX directory (by default, /usr/local).

The ACK should now be ready to use.

USAGE

Currently I haven't sorted out all the documentation --- it's supplied in the distribution, but not all of it gets installed yet --- so here is a quickstart guide.

The main command to use is 'ack'. This invokes the compiler and the linker. Some useful options include:

-m build for the specified platform -o specifies the output file -c produce a .o file -c.s produce a .s assembly file -O enable optimisation (optimisation levels go up to 6) -ansi compile ANSI C (when using the C compiler) -v be more verbose (repeatable)