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README.cygwin
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README.cygwin
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Using SWI-Prolog on Cygwin
==========================
Author: Jan Wielemaker
E-mail: [email protected]
Created: Jun 17 2001
Modified: Nov 21 2005
Nov 23, 2005 by Corinna Vinschen
Wat is Cygwin?
==============
Cygwin is a POSIX emulation environment for Windows (95 and newer, NT 4
and newer). It consists of a DLL which provides POSIX functionality on
top of Windows and ported (mostly GNU) toolchain and applications. For
further info, see http://cygwin.com.
Why SWI-Prolog on Cygwin?
=========================
The original and primary development platform of SWI-Prolog is Unix
(currently SuSE Linux). SWI-Prolog has been ported to MS-Windows using
various emulators of the required basic POSIX functonality. First this
was the WATCOM environment. Right now it is MSVC using the NT Posix
layer with an additional library (src/win32/uxnt) to provide some
additional functionality and work around some bugs and dubious features
of the NT POSIX layer.
Cygwin provides a fairly complete emulation of the POSIX standard, while
allowing access to the native Win32 API at the same time. The cygwin
ports therefore uses exclusively the POSIX source. The only exception
is the stack-allocation that uses the VirtualAlloc() API from Win32 on
older versions of Cygwin, because the mmap() emulation of cygwin was not
good enough up to Cygwin release 1.5.19.
Cygwin is an excellent platform for porting native Unix applications to
Windows without much work. Though the native Win32 version of SWI-Prolog
can run under Cygwin, it is limited in this environment. It cannot load
shared objects created in Cygwin and it doesn't use Cygwins POSIX
extensions to the Windows filesystem (mount-points, symbolic links).
Therefore only a Cygwin version of SWI-Prolog can use advanced POSIX
behaviour, which is especially useful to realise portable advanced
process and server management.
Drawbacks?
==========
Cygwin is just `fairly complete', it doesn't support every POSIX call,
mostly due to lack of manpower. Cygwin is big, so if SWI-Prolog is your
only cygwin application it isn't very interesting. Cygwin is slow,
notably handling calls for which you really want it such as fork().
So, it is useful if your boss says your application *must* run on
Windows and the application uses lots of advanced Unix primitives. In
all other cases I would recomment using a real Unix machine. They are
cheaper and as easy to manage as windows machines these days.
Problems?
=========
Most today Unix systems are based on the ELF executable format, while
Windows uses XCOFF (eXtended COFF). This has some consequences for
making foreign libraries for SWI-Prolog. With the cygwin port we've
started to put all these system dependencies in plld, but it is still
good to know the ins and outs.
* Linking pl.exe
Linking the executable, such that it exports systems and you
can import them in your foreign libraries is now fairly easy,
since gcc and binutils have full support to create DLLs on
Cygwin for some time now.
If you just make a default build, you will get just a static
library libpl.a in $(prefix)/lib/pl-<version>/lib/i686-cygwin,
and the binaries are all linked statically against this library.
If you choose to configure with --enable-shared and after calling
"make install", you'll get a DLL, called cygpl.dll in
$(prefix)/lib/pl-<version>/bin/i686-cygwin, as well as a link
library libpl.dll.a in $(prefix)/lib/pl-<version>/lib/i686-cygwin.
This file is used for linking stand-alone embedded executables
and foreign libraries against the cygpl DLL.
* Creating a foreign library
This is a bit complicated, but luckily hidden from you. The
basic sequence is
gcc -shared -o mylib.dll <input files> -lpl ...
plus a couple of system libraries.
To make life a bit easier in your Makefiles, we've put this
in plld, so you can do on any platform for which plld is
aware of the proper sequence:
plld -shared -o mylib <input files>
If you use the -v option as in
plld -v -shared ...
you can see what system libraries are necessary when linking.
Or simply ask pl:
pl -dump-runtime-variables | grep PLLIBS
Mixing cygwin and native SWI-Prolog?
====================================
It's not possible to use foreign libraries built using the above Cygwin
sequence on the native SWI-Prolog and visa versa. This is caused by
native SWI-Prolog using MSVCRT*.lib, which is mutually exclusive with
the Cygwin POSIX library.