ACL2 Version 8.0 Installation Guide: Requirements

# Requirements

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ACL2 Version 8.0
Copyright (C) 2017, Regents of the University of Texas
ACL2 is licensed under the terms of the LICENSE file distributed with ACL2. See also the documentation topic, COPYRIGHT.

### Table of Contents

- Performance comparisons
- Obtaining Common Lisp (alphabetical listing)
  - Obtaining Allegro Common Lisp
  - Obtaining CCL (OpenMCL)
  - Obtaining CLISP
  - Obtaining CMU Common Lisp
  - Obtaining GCL
  - Obtaining LispWorks
  - Obtaining SBCL

### Performance comparisons

You can see recent performance numbers by following this link, or by going to the ACL2 home page on the web and following the link "Recent changes to this page".

### Obtaining Common Lisp

ACL2 works on Unix, GNU-Linux, and Mac OS X, which we call "Unix-like systems", as well as many Windows operating systems (at least including Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Windows XP). It can be built on top of any of the following Common Lisps, listed here alphabetically.

- Allegro Common Lisp

- CCL (OpenMCL)

- CLISP

- CMU Common Lisp

- GCL

- LispWorks

- SBCL

Obtaining Allegro Common Lisp

The website for Allegro Common Lisp, a commercial implementation, is `http://www.franz.com/`. You may be able to obtain a trial version there.

Obtaining CCL (OpenMCL)

Clozure Common Lisp (Clozure CL, or CCL) was formerly known as OpenMCL. Quoting from the Clozure Common Lisp web page (July, 2014): ``Some distinguishing features of the implementation include fast compilation speed, native threads, a precise, generational, compacting garbage collector, and a convenient foreign-function interface.''

NOTE: Certain ACL2 features are optimized for 64-bit CCL. Some large developments may even fail with 32-bit CCL; so for CCL, the 64-bit version is preferred. To check if your CCL is a 64-bit CCL, evaluate the following expression in your CCL; the result should be `YES`.

    #+x86_64 'yes #-x86_64 'no

Here are instructions for fetching and installing CCL.

Obtaining CLISP

CLISP is a non-commercial Common Lisp implementation, available from `http://clisp.cons.org/`. We do not recommend CLISP as a platform for ACL2, for the following reasons.

- CLISP appears to run ACL2 much more slowly than the other supported Common Lisp implementations.
- Only minimal testing is done for ACL2 built on CLISP.
- CLISP does not support building the default, hons-enabled ACL2 (ACL2(h)), but only (with the limitations expressed above) a discontinued version, ACL2(c).

Obtaining CMU Common Lisp

> NOTE: ACL2 Version 8.0 cannot be reliably run on CMUCL, so we have disabled building ACL2 on CMUCL. The CMUCL implementor is aware of the problem, and we are hoping for a fix before the next ACL2 release so that we can remove this note.

CMU Common Lisp (sometimes called CMUCL) is a non-commercial Common Lisp implementation, available from `http://www.cons.org/cmucl/`.

Obtaining GCL

You might be able to download a binary Debian package for ACL2. Thanks to Camm Maguire for maintaining this package. Note however that it may take some time after each ACL2 release for this binary Debian package to be updated for that release.

Otherwise, it should be easy to obtain and build GCL yourself. Note that ACL2 requires ANSI GCL version 2.6.12 or later. Perhaps simplest is to fetch it via git and then build the executable `gcl/gcl/bin/gcl` as follows.

    git clone git://git.sv.gnu.org/gcl.git
    cd gcl/gcl
    git checkout Version_2_6_13pre
    ./configure --enable-ansi && make

It may also be possible to fetch it from the main GNU website for GCL or perhaps from `backports.debian.org`, in which case ANSI GCL can be built as shown above:

    cd gcl && ./configure --enable-ansi && make

Obtaining LispWorks

LispWorks is a commercial Common Lisp implementation. You can download a free, restricted, version from `http://www.lispworks.com/`. You may ask the vendor for an evaluation license for the full product if you are considering purchasing a license.

Obtaining SBCL

SBCL (Steel Bank Common Lisp) is a non-commercial Common Lisp implementation, available from `http://sbcl.sourceforge.net/`.

Building ACL2 may initially fail with SBCL because of insufficient heap memory. Harsh Raju Chamarthi points out that a fix is to run SBCL with an increased heap size limit. As of 2014 we find that the the option `--dynamic-space-size 2000` following works well on 64-bit linux, for example using a script like the following for SBCL.

    #!/bin/sh
    <sbcl-dir-path>/src/runtime/sbcl --core <sbcl-dir-path>/output/sbcl.core --dynamic-space-size 2000 "$@"

If you try to run large jobs using ACL2 build on SBCL, such as building the ACL2+books combined manual, you may fail with and error, "Immobile space exhausted". We have avoided this error by building SBCL from source rather than obtaining a binary, using options as follows:

    sh make.sh --without-immobile-space --without-immobile-code --without-compact-instance-header

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