mercury/README.AIX.md

Mercury on AIX

This file documents the port of Mercury to AIX.

Mercury was tested on AIX in 2019 with the following configuration.

• AIX 7.1 on POWER9.
• GCC version 6.3.0.
• High-level C grades (hlc.gc, hlc.par.gc).

Prerequisites

Install yum by running this script.

Then install the necessary packages:

    $ yum install gcc make flex bison

Building with GCC

GCC defaults to -maix32. To build for the 64-bit AIX ABI, it may be easiest to create a shell script containing:

    exec gcc -maix64 "$@"

Mark the script executable and then run configure like this:

    $ CC=/path/to/gcc-maix64 ./configure [options]

If you are using /usr/bin/ar then you must also set an environment variable:

    $ export OBJECT_MODE=64

If you try to use GNU ar instead (from binutils) you will run into problems when /usr/bin/ranlib is invoked on archives created by GNU ar.

The mercury_compile executable will overflow the PowerPC TOC with gcc in its default configuration. One solution is to add this to Mmake.params before running make:

    EXTRA_CFLAGS=-mminimal-toc

Your own programs may also overflow the TOC, depending on their size.

Building with IBM XL C

(Last tested in 2014.)

To use the IBM XL C compiler, pass --with-cc=xlc when configuring the Mercury installation. Use high-level C grades for better performance.

Large programs will overflow the TOC. You can try passing the option -qpic=large to the C compiler and the linker, or passing -bbigtoc to the linker.

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