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.
Note
Please note that running Chapel on Cygwin is supported only as a portability option and should not be expected to result in good performance. For users wanting to run Chapel on Windows systems, the preferred approach is to use the Windows Subsystem for Linux / Linux Bash Shell.
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.
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