README.MacOSX

SWI-Prolog on MacOS X
---------------------

Last updated:

	- Dec 18, 2012
	- SWI-Prolog 6.3.5
	- Xcode 4.5.1
	- MacOS 10.7 (Lion)

Option 1: Install using Macports
--------------------------------

SWI-Prolog is provided as a Macports  (www.macports.org/) project. It is
adviced to install Macports, after  which   you  can  install the latest
submitted port using

	% sudo port selfupdate
	% sudo port install swi-prolog

This installs the binary as /opt/local/bin/swipl   and the actual system
in /opt/local/lib/swipl-<version>


Option 2: Install from source
-----------------------------

If you install from source (e.g.,  from   the  SWI-Prolog tarball or the
SWI-Prolog  git  repositories),  you  still    need   Macports  for  the
dependencies.

You have two options to install  the dependencies. Installing SWI-Prolog
as in option 1  also  installs   the  dependencies.  Unfurtunately, this
installs lots of Macport  alternatives  for   MacOS  libraries  that are
prefectly suitable for running SWI-Prolog. If   you  want lean Macports,
you can restrict the installation to the following dependencies.

	% sudo port install readline ncurses jpeg libmcrypt gmp zlib
	% sudo port install libarchive ossp-uuid

Regardless of which way you used to install the dependent libraries, you
need to install some development tools that are not in Xcode:

	% sudo port install pkgconfig autoconf

Finally, you need to install  the  Oracle's   Java  SDK  or  you need to
disable JPL in the build[.templ] script.

LLVM
----

SWI-Prolog compiles both with native gcc   and llvm-gcc. llvm-gcc is the
distributed with recent versions of  xcode. Originally, gcc-4.2 provided
better performance than llvm-gcc. We  do   not  have recent comparisons.
Please share information with info@swi-prolog.org if  you decide to do a
comparison.

Development tools (X11)
-----------------------

No matter how you  install  SWI-Prolog,  in   order  to  run  the Prolog
development    tools    you    need    X11      installed.    See    the
http://xquartz.macosforge.org/