@node Building ECL
@section Building ECL

Due to its portable nature ECL works on every (at least) 32-bit
architecture which provides a proper C99 compliant compiler.

Operating systems on which ECL is reported to work: Linux, Darwin (Mac
OS X), Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFly BSD, Windows and
Android. On each of them ECL supports native threads.

In the past Juanjo José García-Ripoll maintained a test farm which
performed ECL tests for each release on number of platforms and
architectures. Due to lack of the resources we can't afford such doing,
however each release is tested by volunteers with an excellent package
@uref{https://common-lisp.net/project/cl-test-grid,cl-test-grid} created
and maintained by Anton Vodonosov.

@subsection Autoconf based configuration

ECL, like many other FOSS programs, can be built and installed with a
GNU tool called Autoconf. This is a set of automatically generated
scripts that detect the features of your machine, such as the compiler
type, existing libraries, desired installation path, and configures ECL
accordingly. The following procedure describes how to build ECL using
this procedure and it applies to all platforms except for the Windows
ports using Microsoft Visual Studio compilers (however you may build ECL
with cygwin or mingw using the autoconf as described here).

To build @ecl{} you need to

@enumerate
@item
Extract the source code and enter it's directory

@example
$ tar -xf ecl-xx.x.x.tgz
$ cd ecl-xx.x.x
@end example

@item
Run the configuration file, build the program and install it

@example
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local
$ make                          # -jX if you have X cores
$ make install
@end example

@item
Make sure the program is installed and ready to run:

@example
$ /usr/local/bin/ecl

ECL (Embeddable Common-Lisp) 16.0.0
Copyright (C) 1984 Taiichi Yuasa and Masami Hagiya
Copyright (C) 1993 Giuseppe Attardi
Copyright (C) 2000 Juan J. Garcia-Ripoll
Copyright (C) 2015 Daniel Kochmanski
ECL is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it
under certain conditions; see file 'Copyright' for details.
Type :h for Help.
Top level in: #<process TOP-LEVEL>.
> 
@end example
@end enumerate

@subsection Platform specific instructions
@subsubsection MSVC based configuration

If you have a commercial version of Microsoft Visual Studio, the steps
are simple:

@enumerate
@item
Change to the msvc directory.
@item
Run nmake to build ECL.
@item
Run nmake install prefix=d:\Software\ECL where the prefix is the
directory where you want to install ECL.
@item
Optionally, if you want to build a self-installing executable, you can
install NSIS and run nmake windows-nsi.
@end enumerate

If you want to build ECL using the free Microsoft Visual Studio Express
2013 or better, you should follow these before building ECL as sketched
before:

@enumerate
@item
Download and install Microsoft Visual Studio C++ Compiler.
@item
Download and install the Windows SDK
@item
Open the Windows SDK terminal, which will set up the appropriate paths
and environment variables.
@end enumerate

@c @node BSD systems
@c @subsubsection BSD systems

@c @node Android
@c @subsubsection Android