2.1 Configuring and installing gnu lightning

The first thing to do to use gnu lightning is to configure the program, picking the set of macros to be used on the host architecture; this configuration is automatically performed by the configure shell script; to run it, merely type:

          ./configure

gnu lightning supports cross-compiling in that you can choose a different set of macros from the one needed on the computer that you are compiling gnu lightning on. For example,

          ./configure --host=sparc-sun-linux

will select the SPARC set of runtime assemblers. You can use configure's ability to make reasonable assumptions about the vendor and operating system and simply type

          ./configure --host=i386
          ./configure --host=ppc
          ./configure --host=sparc

Another option that configure accepts is --enable-assertions, which enables several consistency checks in the run-time assemblers. These are not usually needed, so you can decide to simply forget about it; also remember that these consistency checks tend to slow down your code generator.

After you've configured gnu lightning, you don't have to compile it because it is nothing more than a set of include files. If you want to compile the examples, run make as usual. The next important step is:

         make install

This ends the process of installing gnu lightning.