Building Chapel

To build the Chapel compiler, set up your environment as described in Chapel Quickstart Instructions (or Setting up Your Environment for Chapel for more settings), cd to $CHPL_HOME, and run GNU make.

On many systems, GNU make is available simply as make. On others, it is called gmake. So, first check if make refers to GNU make:

# If the first line includes "GNU Make", you have GNU Make.
make -v

Further instructions will assume make refers to GNU Make. If that’s not the case, you’ll need to replace make with gmake.

Now build the Chapel compiler:

cd $CHPL_HOME
make

Parallel builds such as make -j 6 are also supported.

If everything works as intended, you ought to see:

1. each of the compiler source subdirectories being compiled

2. the compiler binary getting linked and stored as:

   $CHPL_HOME/bin/$CHPL_HOST_PLATFORM/chpl

3. the runtime support libraries being compiled, archived, and stored in a configuration-specific subdirectory under:

   $CHPL_HOME/lib/$CHPL_TARGET_PLATFORM.$CHPL_TARGET_COMPILER.../

If you get an error or failure during the make process, first double-check that you have the required prerequisites (see Chapel Prerequisites). If you do, please submit a bug report for the failure and any workaround that you come up with, through Reporting Chapel Issues

Note that each make command only builds the compiler and runtime for the current set of CHPL_ environment variables defined by (and inferred for) your environment. Thus, while the directory structure above supports the ability to have multiple versions of the compiler and runtime built simultaneously, only one version will be created for each make command. To support additional host/target platforms, host/target compilers, or threading/communication layers, you will need to reset your environment variables and re-make.

After a successful build, you should be able to run the compiler and display its help message using:

chpl --help

In which case, you will be ready to move on to compiling with the Chapel compiler (see Compiling Chapel Programs). The rest of this file gives more information about Chapel’s Makefiles for advanced users or developers of Chapel.

Platform Support

Currently supported platforms include 32- and 64-bit Linux, Mac OS X, Cygwin (Windows), SunOS, a variety of current HPE and Cray platforms, and a few systems by other vendors. Most UNIX-based environments ought to support Chapel (subject to the assumptions in Chapel Prerequisites), but may not be supported “out-of-the-box” by our current Makefile structure. See the section below on platform-specific settings for more information on adding support for additional UNIX-compatible environments.

Note that a single Chapel installation can simultaneously support Chapel for multiple platforms and compiler options because all platform-specific binary files and executables are stored in subdirectories named by CHPL_ environment variables.

Makefile Targets

The Chapel sources are structured so that a GNU-compatible make utility can be used in any source directory to build the sources contained in that directory and its subdirectories. All of these Makefiles support the following targets:

Target	Action
(nothing) default all	Build the appropriate output files e.g. objects, libraries, executables
clean	Remove the intermediate files for this configuration
cleanall	Remove the intermediate files for all configurations
clobber	Remove everything created by the Makefiles Note: make clobber will remove chplconfig
install	Install chapel to a previously configured location

Each target processes all subdirectories then the current directory.

Makefile Options

The Chapel makefiles have a few options that enable or disable optimization, debugging support, profiling, and backend C compiler warnings. The variables are described below. Set the value to 1 to enable the feature.

Option	Effect
DEBUG	Generate debug information (e.g. add -g to C compiler).
OPTIMIZE	Enable optimizations (e.g. add -O3 to C compiler).
PROFILE	Enable profiling support (e.g. add -pg to C compiler).
WARNINGS	Promote backend C compiler warnings to errors.
ASSERTS	Enables correctness assertions in the compiler and runtime.

Platform-specific Settings

The structure of Chapel’s Makefiles is designed to factor any compiler-specific settings in $CHPL_HOME/make/compiler/Makefile.<compiler> where <compiler> refers to $CHPL_HOST_COMPILER for the compiler sources and $CHPL_TARGET_COMPILER for the runtime sources and generated code. Refer to Setting up Your Environment for Chapel for more information about these variables and their default settings.

In addition, any architecture-specific settings are defined in $CHPL_HOME/make/platform/Makefile.<platform>, where <platform> refers to $CHPL_HOST_PLATFORM for the compiler sources and $CHPL_TARGET_PLATFORM for the runtime sources and generated code. Again, Setting up Your Environment for Chapel details these variables and their default settings.

If you try making the compiler and runtime for an unknown platform, it will assume that you want to use gcc/g++ to compile the code and that you require no platform-specific settings. You can add support for a new build environment by creating Makefile.<compiler> and/or Makefile.<platform> files and setting your environment variables to refer to those files. If you do develop new build environment support that you would like to contribute back to the community, we encourage you to submit a pull request to the Chapel GitHub repository.

Installing Chapel

Chapel can be built and installed as follows:

./configure # adding appropriate options
make
make install # possibly with elevated privilege

See ./configure --help for more information on the options available.

Note

./configure will save the current configuration into a chplconfig file and can set the installation path that will be compiled in to the chpl binary.