This is Parrot, version 0.4.6 ----------------------------- Parrot is Copyright (C) 2001-2006, The Perl Foundation. $Id: /local/README 14032 2006-08-09T01:15:23.527431Z chip $ LICENSE INFORMATION ------------------- This code is distributed under the same license as Perl 5; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of either: a) the GNU General Public License as found in the directory "LICENSES" b) the "Artistic License" which can be found in the directory "LICENSES" This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See either the GNU General Public License or the Artistic License for more details. PREREQUISITES ------------- You'll need a C compiler, a linker and a make program of course. If you will be linking with the ICU library you have to download and install it before configuring Parrot. Get it from http://www-306.ibm.com/software/globalization/icu/downloads.jsp You'll also need Perl 5.6.1 or above to run various configure and build scripts. For most of the platforms that we are supporting initially, Parrot should build out of the box. The list of targeted platforms can be found in PLATFORMS. The current configure system is primitive, as it's only a temporary solution. It will be happy with most any answers you decide to feed it. Garbage In, Garbage Out. INSTRUCTIONS ------------ For now, unpack your Parrot tarball, (if you're reading this, you've probably already done that) and type perl Configure.pl to run the Configure script. The Configure.pl script extracts configuration from the running perl5 program. Unfortunately, the perl5 configuration is not set up to compile and link c++ programs, so you may need to explicitly tell Configure.pl which compiler and linker to use. For example, to compile C files with 'cc', C++ files with 'CC', and link everything together with 'CC', you would type perl Configure.pl --cc=cc --cxx=CC --link=CC --ld=CC See "perl Configure.pl --help" for more options. For systems like HPUX that don't have inet_pton please run perl Configure.pl --define=inet_aton Running Configure.pl will generate a config.h header, a Parrot::Config module, platform files and some Makefiles. The file "myconfig" has an overview of configure settings. Next, run make: For UNIX like systems that come with its own make, 'gmake' should be used. (On most Linux systems, this is the default make.) On windows systems, 'nmake' is used On other systems, just try 'make' NOTE: do *NOT* use the '-j' option to make. The dependencies in the generated Makefile work if you do them sequentially, but running with -j will almost certainly cause a build error. Patches welcome. Now, the interpreter should build. If you are building the ICU library (this is the default on most systems), you need to use GNU make instead (or something compatible with it). NOTE: If you have trouble linking parrot, this *may* be due to a pre-existing parrot version installed via 'make install'. Until this issue is resolved, you may have to delete the installed version of parrot before building a new one. Our apologies. You can test parrot by running make test (or nmake test or gmake test) You can run the full test suite with make fulltest Note: PLATFORMS contains notes about whether test failures are expected on your system. On some systems you can install parrot: make install This installs a bunch of files in /usr/local. The parrot executable is in /usr/local/bin. Please note that this feature is currently experimental. If you want to install Parrot into a non-standard location use: perl Configure.pl --prefix=/Users/foo/parrot-0.4.6 make install But please note that dynamic libs will not be found for non-standard locations unless you set LD_LIBRARY_PATH or similar. Look at docs/parrot.pod and docs/intro.pod for where to go from here. If you have any problems, see the section "Reporting Problems" in docs/intro.pod. These documents are in POD format. You can view these files with: perldoc -F docs/intro.pod NOTES ----- On some older computers with little RAM, the computed-goto dispatch core (ops/core_ops_cg.c) may take a while to compile or may fail to compile at all. You can pass a flag to Configure.pl (--cgoto=0) to disable the computed-goto core, at a slight cost in runtime speed. CHANGES ------- For documentation on the user-visible changes between this version and previous versions, please see NEWS. MAILING LISTS ------------- The mailing list for parrot is parrot-porters. Subscribe by sending mail to parrot-porters-subscribe@perl.org. It is archived at http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl6.internals and available via NNTP at nntp://nntp.perl.org/perl.perl6.internals You can also read the list via Google Groups at http://groups-beta.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals WEB SITES --------- The following web sites have all the Parrot information you need: http://www.parrotcode.org/ http://dev.perl.org/perl6/ http://bugs6.perl.org/ http://pugscode.org/ http://www.poniecode.org/ Have fun, The Parrot Team.