Building Jacl under UNIX/Linux

About:

Jacl users should note that a pre-compiled binary release is available, so building from source is not required. Jacl is built using a configure script and has been tested on a variety of UNIX/Linux systems.

First, download the Jacl archive file and uncompress it into a directory. The following assumes that the user has created a temp directory /tmp/jacl, that the archive file has been downloaded and saved in this directory, that Jacl will be installed into /opt/jacl, and that the JDK install is located in /opt/jdk14. 


cd /tmp/jacl
tar -xzvf jacl1.4.0.tar.gz
mkdir build
cd build
../jacl1.4.0/configure --prefix=/opt/jacl --with-jdk=/opt/jdk14

After the configure script finishes, run the following commands to build and install Jacl. 


make
make install

One can also build and run the optional regression tests with the following command. Be aware that running the regression tests can take a long time. 


make test

Running make install will install a startup script that should be used run Jacl. This script is named jaclsh, it would be installed into /opt/jacl/bin/jaclsh by the example above. 


/opt/jacl/bin/jaclsh
% package require java
1.4.0
% exit

TJC Compiler

The TJC compiler is included in Jacl 1.4.0 and later releases. The TJC compiler is used to compile Tcl code into Java bytecode which is then executed directly in the JVM. Since the TJC compiler is implemented in Tcl, TJC can be used to compile itself. This is known as a 2-stage compile and makes the TJC compiler execute about 10 times faster. For this reason, it is suggested that users build TJC via a 2-stage compile as follows. Be aware that this process is very slow, it can take 20 minutes or more on a fast system. Also note that Jacl must have been built and installed before the following commands are run. 


make tjc2
make install

Installed Files