Using Chapel on Cygwin

Chapel can be used on both 32-bit and 64-bit installations of Cygwin. Chapel can be sensitive to directories with spaces, but otherwise it will work on Cygwin just like any other platform.

Unpacking Chapel

For best results, avoid using WinZip to unpack the release, or make sure that it is running in a mode that will not convert textfiles to use Windows-style carriage-return/linefeed end-of-lines – doing so can change Makefiles such that they break the build process. We recommend using Cygwin’s gunzip and tar utilities to unpack the release:

gunzip chapel.tar.gz
tar xvf chapel.tar

It is best to unpack the release in a directory whose path contains no spaces. For example, unpacking the release in the root directory of your hard-drive (/cygdrive/c/) to create /cygdrive/c/chapel tends to work well. Currently, our compiler-generated Makefiles break when the compiler or runtime use an absolute path that contains spaces. If any Cygwin experts have tips on addressing this issue in a portable way, please let us know at chapel_info@cray.com.

Required Packages

In order to get the required tools listed in Chapel Prerequisites, Cygwin users will need to ensure that the following packages are installed in addition to the standard set of Cygwin packages:

Devel
  • gcc and gcc-g++
  • make
Perl
  • perl
Python
  • python
Utils
  • diffutils

Additional Information

For more information on Cygwin, please refer to: