Chapel Prerequisites

If you have a standard UNIX environment, a C/C++ compiler, some basic scripting languages, a GNU-compatible make, and awk installed you should have no problems getting started with Chapel.

Prerequisites

In slightly more detail, the following are prerequisites and assumptions about your environment for using Chapel:

  • You are using an environment that supports standard UNIX commands such as: cd, mkdir, rm, echo

  • You have a Bourne shell available at /bin/sh, ‘env’ available at /usr/bin/env, and that ‘env’ can locate python3 or python on your system.

  • You have Python 2.7 or newer.

  • You have access to gmake or a GNU-compatible version of make.

  • You have access to standard C and C++11 compilers. We test our code using a range of compilers on a nightly basis; these include relatively recent versions of gcc/g++, clang, and compilers from HPE Cray and Intel. If using GCC, we recommend GCC version 5 or newer.

  • Building GMP requires an M4 macro processor.

  • Building LLVM requires cmake version 3.13.4 or later.

  • If you wish to use chpldoc or Chapel’s test system, Python 3.5 or newer is required and the python3 and pip3 commands must be available. The venv Python package must be available (note that it is often included by default in a Python 3 installation). Additionally, curl, perl, and python3-devel (or equivalent packages for your platform) are required.

  • If you wish to use Mason, chapel’s package manager, git is required.

    • The mason system subcommands additionally require pkg-config.

Installation

We have used the following commands to install the above prerequisites:

  • CentOS, Fedora:

    sudo dnf install gcc gcc-c++ m4 perl python3 python3-devel bash make gawk git

  • Debian, Ubuntu:

    sudo apt-get install gcc g++ m4 perl python3 python3-pip python3-venv python3-dev bash make mawk git pkg-config

  • FreeBSD:

    sudo pkg install gcc m4 perl5 python3 py37-pip bash gmake gawk git pkgconf