Building bsc/bluetcl from source on darwin/arm64 machines

[iamkarthikbk]

Hi

I've been using linux whenever I have had to build verilog out of my bsv code. I had somehow gotten bsc up and running on my mac, i think it was one of the release versions (make release) but bluetcl somehow never worked. some of my bluetcl scripts (which work fine on linux/amd64) tell me that "try" is not a valid command. i think that this is a tcl problem, and not specific to bluespec. i believe that rebuilding the compiler after updating my tcl version (using one from activestate instead) may help solve the issue.

I've tried following the ci yaml, but i think yices2 is unable to create a makefile target for darwin. i went ahead and tried a bunch of things, looked like the gmp libraries are not visible in path, so I did this:

CFLAGS=-I/opt/homebrew/opt/gmp/include LDFLAGS=-L/opt/homebrew/opt/gmp/lib

but the problem is not solved with this.

i want to ask if there's a certain guide to installing bsc/bluetcl on macos (arm64), something similar to the existing guide for linux would be extremely helpful. thanks in advance.

[quark17]

The macos releases are built on x86_64 (amd64), so I don't know if they would work if installed on an arm64 mac.

However, can you show the "try" error that you were receiving? Maybe we can debug that and get it working.

Also, I don't think you need to go into the /opt/homebrew/opt subdirectory, for the include and lib files. I would have expected they would be in /opt/homebrew/include and /opt/homebrew/lib -- but I don't have that kind of installation. I'm on an Intel macOS, and Homebrew installs into /usr/local/ for me. Reading the Homebrew documentation, I do see that Homebrew installs into a different location for Apple silicon vs Intel macOS, so that's why it's in /opt/homebrew for you.

The CI yaml works on GitHub's macos13/x86_64 virtual machines. If you follow that, I would expect it to work. However, maybe the /opt difference requires some changes in BSC's makefiles? But I know that several people are using BSC on newer macs, and I assumed that it worked out of the box for them. Maybe one of them can comment here about whether they had to change anything?

One thing you could try is to change the default C/C++ to use GCC installed from Homebrew instead of the default Clang from the OS. However, I wouldn't expect this to be necessary. (I use the default compiler on macOS 11/x86_64.)

Another thing you can try is to update the Yices submodule to a newer commit. The BSC repo checks out the Yices2 repo at a specific commit, and maybe there have been updates to it for compiling on newer Macs. (But, again, I thought it was working out of the box, for people on newer Macs.)

I don't have an Apple silicon Mac, and the CI only tests on x86_64. If newer Macs need something different, I can't be of much help -- hopefully someone else can comment. I build according to what the CI yaml does. The CI VM has ghcup pre-installed, and ghc/cabal is installed via that. The VM has Homebrew installed, for adding additional packages. The ones we install are given in the file install_dependencies_macos.sh:

brew install \
  autoconf \
  ccache \
  gperf \
  icarus-verilog \
  pkg-config

You don't need to install ccache; we just use that to speed up the CI. There may be some other packages needed which we don't explicitly install because the GitHub VM already has them installed -- for example, the VM already has libgmp. And Yices2 builds fine for me. I just run make install-src; I don't set anything special in the environment.

If one of the pre-built releases was mostly working for you, then I suggest using that, and I can help debug any Tcl issues. (Note that there are some open bugs for Tcl issues on MacOS, such as B-Lang-org/bdw#12 and #504.)

If changes to the BSC repo are needed for building on newer Macs, hopefully someone can submit a PR. And it would be good to have build instructions for macOS, not just Ubuntu, though it's straightforward and follows what the CI does: install GHC using ghcup, install the cabal packages, install Homebrew and install the packages shown above (minus ccache), and run make install-src.

[quark17]

Also note: the BSC makefiles expect to use the Tcl that comes with the OS, not Tcl installed via Homebrew. If you have Tcl in Homebrew, you'll need to unlink it or remove it from the path. The pre-built releases also expect to use the Tcl from the OS. (This is something that may need to change in the future, but for now it's how things are done. Issue #504 links to some commits that can be applied for building Bluetcl using the Homebrew Tcl instead.)

So if you had Tcl installed in Homebrew, that could maybe be why you had a problem.

[quark17]

I received confirmation from two people that building on a newer Mac works out of the box for them. I suggest trying again to build BSC like the CI does (as I described above), and if you run into an error, post it here and we can investigate what's going wrong.