02 Apr 2010 (permalink)

Compiling Guile 1.9.x

It is a small reminder on how to compile Guile 1.9.x.

Prerequisites

You will need:

The latter is normally installed on any GNU/Linux system as a part of Gcc package.

Configuration

Guile's configure script relies on pkg-config to locate its prerequisites. A very unfortunate choice, in my opinion. On most boxes where I tried to configure it, a plain invocation of configure without additional options proved unable to locate prerequisite components. One may, of course, edit pc files to placate pkg-config, but it's rather counter-productive. So, I prefer to simply ignore pkg-config and get away without it.

That being said, and supposing you have Gcc version 4.2.4 and libgc installed in /usr/local/include, the following command should correctly configure the package:

./configure LIBFFI_LIBS=-lffi LIBFFI_CFLAGS=-I/usr/lib/gcc/i486-slackware-linux/4.2.4/include \
            BDW_GC_LIBS=-lgc BDW_GC_CFLAGS=-I/usr/local/include

Once done with the configure, launch make and switch to some other activity. It is no use sitting and staring at the monitor, because the build takes quite some time. On my box, for example, the compilation lasted 23 minutes.