Building a VM¶

Last updated 5 January 2014 for Self 4.5.0

The sources for the Self VM are on the GitHub repository.

To build a Self VM, you need CMake in at least version 2.8.

You can do an in-tree build with:

cmake .
cmake --build .

or an out-of-tree build with:

mkdir -p $YOU_BUILD_DIRECTORY; cd $YOU_BUILD_DIRECTORY
cmake $DIRECTORY_OF_SELF_CHECKOUT
cmake --build $YOU_BUILD_DIRECTORY

Self builds with GCC ≥ 4.2 or Clang ≥ 2.0. CMake respects your environment variables, so to build Self with Clang, configure it like this:

CC=clang CXX=clang++ cmake $DIRECTORY_OF_SELF_CHECKOUT

On Mac OS X with Xcode, you can use the Xcode generator of CMake like this:

cmake -GXcode $DIRECTORY_OF_SELF_CHECKOUT

On 64bit Linux, you may want to explicitely use 32bit compilation:

CC="gcc -m32" CXX="g++ -m32" cmake $DIRECTORY_OF_SELF_CHECKOUT

The same holds for Clang.

You may whish to use ccmake or the CMake GUI (cmake-gui or the CMake.app on OS X) to configure available features like Release/Debug/Profiled builds or to enable experimental features.