Installing MPFR =============== Note: In case of problem, please read this INSTALL file carefully before reporting a bug, in particular Section "In case of problem" below. Some problems are due to bad configuration on the user side (not specific to MPFR). 0. You first need to install GMP. See . MPFR requires GMP version 4.1 or later. 1. Extract the files from the archive. 2. It is strongly advised to apply the latest patches (if this has not been done yet), e.g. wget http://www.mpfr.org/mpfr-2.4.1/patches patch -N -Z -p1 < patches or curl http://www.mpfr.org/mpfr-2.4.1/patches | patch -N -Z -p1 3. In the MPFR directory, to detect your system, type: ./configure possibly with options (see below, in particular if this step or one of the following fails). Note: paths provided in configure options must always be absolute (relative paths are not supported). 4. To build the library, type: make 5. To check the built library (runs the test files), type: make check 6. To install it (default "/usr/local" | see "--prefix" option), type: make install If you installed MPFR (header and library) in directories that are not searched by default by the compiler and/or linking tools, then, like with other libraries, you may need to set up some environment variables such as C_INCLUDE_PATH (to find the header mpfr.h), LIBRARY_PATH (to find the library), and if the shared library has been installed, LD_LIBRARY_PATH (before execution) or LD_RUN_PATH (before linking); this list is not exhaustive and some environment variables may be specific to your system. "make install" gives some instructions; please read them. You can also find more information in the manuals of your compiler and linker. The MPFR FAQ may also give some information. Remember that if you have several MPFR (or GMP) versions installed (e.g., one with the system, and one, newer, by you), you will not necessarily get a compilation/linking error if a wrong library is used (e.g., because LD_LIBRARY_PATH has not been set correctly). But unexpected results may occur. Under Mac OS X, if the shared library was not installed and you use Apple's linker (this is the default), you will also need to provide the -search_paths_first linker flag ("-Wl,-search_paths_first" when you link via gcc) to make sure that the right library is selected, as by default, Apple's linker selects a shared library preferably, even when it is farther in the library paths. We recall that if a wrong library is selected due to this behavior, unexpected results may occur. Building the documentation ========================== To build the documentation in various formats, you may first need to install recent versions of some utilities such as texinfo. * Type "make info" to produce the documentation in the info format. * Type "make pdf" to produce the documentation in the PDF format. * Type "make dvi" to produce the documentation in the DVI format. * Type "make ps" to produce the documentation in the Postscript format. * Type "make html" to produce the documentation in the HTML format (in several pages); if you want only one output HTML file, then type "makeinfo --html --no-split mpfr.texi" instead. Building MPFR with internal GMP header files ============================================ MPFR built with internal GMP header files is a bit faster, so you may want to build it with them. Just do this in step 1: ./configure --with-gmp-build=GMPBUILD where GMPBUILD is the GMP build directory. The needed header files are: gmp-impl.h, longlong.h and all the necessary headers to use them. Warning: the library obtained in this way may use some internal GMP symbols, and thus dynamically linking your software with a different version of GMP might fail, even though it is declared as compatible by Libtool's versioning system. ./configure options =================== --prefix=DIR installs MPFR headers and library in DIR/include and DIR/lib respectively (the default is "/usr/local"). --with-gmp-include=DIR assumes that DIR contains gmp.h --with-gmp-lib=DIR assumes that DIR contains the GMP library --with-gmp=DIR assumes that DIR is where you have installed GMP. same as --with-gmp-lib=DIR/lib and --with-gmp-include=DIR/include (use either --with-gmp alone or one or both of --with-gmp-lib/--with-gmp-include) Warning! Do not use these options if you have CPPFLAGS and/or LDFLAGS containing a -I or -L option with a directory that contains a GMP header or library file, as these options just add -I and -L options to CPPFLAGS and LDFLAGS *after* the ones that are currently declared, so that DIR will have a lower precedence. Also, this may not work if DIR is a system directory. --with-gmp-build=DIR assumes that DIR contains the source of GMP and enables the use of GMP internals. Try to set CC/CFLAGS to GMP's ones. This is not guaranteed to work as the configure script does some compiler tests earlier, and the change may be too late. Warning! This option and the group of options --with-gmp are mutually exclusive. --enable-assert build MPFR with assertions. --enable-thread-safe build MPFR as thread safe, using compiler-level Thread Local Storage (TLS). Note: TLS support is roughly tested by configure. If configure detects that TLS does not work (because of the compiler, linker or system libraries), it will output an error message, telling you to build MPFR without thread safe. For instance, though Mac OS X uses GCC, it may not currently support GCC's __thread storage class. Run "./configure --help" to see the other options (autoconf default options). In case of problem ================== First, look for any warning message in the configure output. Several documents may help you to solve the problem: * this INSTALL file, in particular information given below; * the FAQ (either the FAQ.html file distributed with MPFR, or the on-line version , which may be more up-to-date); * the MPFR web page for this version , which lists bugs found in this version and provides some patches. If the "configure" fails, please check that the C compiler and its options are the same as those for the GMP build (specially the ABI). You can see the latter with the following command: grep "^CC\|^CFLAGS" GMPBUILD/Makefile if the GMP build directory is available. Then type: ./configure CC= CFLAGS= and continue the install. On some platforms, you should provide further options to match those used by GMP, or set some environment variables. For instance, see the "Notes on AIX/PowerPC" section below. Warning! Do NOT use optimization options that can change the semantics of math operations, such as GCC's -ffast-math or Sun CC's -fast. Otherwise conversions from/to double's may be incorrect on infinities, NaN's and signed zeros. Since native FP arithmetic is used in a few places only, such options would not make MPFR faster anyway. On some platforms, try with "gmake" (GNU make) instead of "make". Problems have been reported with the Tru64 make. If the build was OK, but the tests failed to link with GMP or gave an error like undefined reference to `__gmp_get_memory_functions' meaning that the GMP library was not found or a wrong GMP library was selected by the linker, then your library search paths are probably not correctly set (some paths are missing or they are specified in an incorrect order). Such problems commonly occur under GNU/Linux machines, where default header and library paths may be inconsistent: gcc is configured to search /usr/local/include by default, while /usr/local/lib is not in the default search paths. If you have a GMP version installed in /usr (provided by the OS) and a new one installed in /usr/local, then the header of the new GMP version and the library of the old GMP version will be used! A typical error is the above one in "make check". The solution is to add /usr/local/include to your C_INCLUDE_PATH and to add /usr/local/lib to your LIBRARY_PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH (and/or LD_RUN_PATH), as said above. Alternatively, you can use --with-gmp* configure options (described above), e.g. --with-gmp=/usr/local, but other software that uses GMP and/or MPFR will need correct paths too, and environment variables allow to set them in a global way. For instance, under Unix, where paths are separated by a colon: * With POSIX sh-compatible shells (e.g. sh, ksh, bash, zsh): export C_INCLUDE_PATH="/usr/local/include:/other/path/include" export LIBRARY_PATH="/usr/local/lib:/other/path/lib" export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$LIBRARY_PATH" * With csh or tcsh: setenv C_INCLUDE_PATH "/usr/local/include:/other/path/include" setenv LIBRARY_PATH "/usr/local/lib:/other/path/lib" setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH "$LIBRARY_PATH" If you can't solve your problem, you should contact us at , indicating the machine and operating system used (uname -a), the compiler and version used (gcc -v if you use gcc), the configure options used if any (including variables such as CC and CFLAGS), the version of GMP and MPFR used, and a description of the problem encountered. Please send us also the log of the "configure" (config.log). Note that even if you can build MPFR with a C++ compiler, you can't run the test suite: C and C++ are not the same language! You should use a C compiler instead. Notes on FreeBSD 4.3 ==================== FreeBSD 4.3 is provided with an incorrect header file, and MPFR tests related to long double's may fail. If you cannot upgrade the system, you can still use MPFR with FreeBSD 4.3, but you should not use conversions with the long double type. Notes on AIX/PowerPC ==================== The following has been tested on AIX 5.3 (powerpc-ibm-aix5.3.0.0) with gcc 3.3.2 and GMP 4.2.1. Before building and testing MPFR, you should set the OBJECT_MODE environment variable to 64 (as GMP selects the 64-bit ABI by default), e.g. with: export OBJECT_MODE=64 (in a sh-compatible shell). But you should also provide a correct CFLAGS value to the "configure" script: using --with-gmp-build is not sufficient due to the early compiler tests, as gcc will not compile any program if OBJECT_MODE is 64 and the -maix64 option is not provided. Notes on 32-bit Windows Applications (win32) ============================================ 1 - We advise to use mingw (http://www.mingw.org/), which is simpler and less demanding than Cygwin. Contrary to Cygwin, it also provides native Windows code. The binaries compiled with Cygwin require a dynamic library (cygwin.dll) to work; there is a Cygwin option -mno-cygwin to build native code, but it may require some non-portable tricks. 2 - If you just want to make a binary with gcc, there is nothing to do: GMP, MPFR and the program compile exactly as under Linux. 3 - If you want to make libraries to work under another Windows compiler like Visual C / C++, you have two options. Since the unix-like *.a library files are compatible with Windows *.lib files, you can simply rename all *.a libraries to *.lib. The second option is to build MPFR with the Microsoft Visual Studio compiler to produce Windows libraries directly (Visual Studio build projects for MPFR are available at http://fp.gladman.plus.com/computing/gmp4win.htm). With gmp-4.1.3, the only remaining problem seems to be the "alloca" calls in GMP. Configuring GMP and MPFR with --enable-alloca=malloc-reentrant should work (if you build MPFR with GMP internal files). Or you could add the library "$MINGWIN$/lib/gcc-lib/mingw32/$VERSION$/libgcc.a" to your project: it contains all the extra-functions needed by a program compiled by gcc (division of 64-bit integer, bcopy, alloca...). Of course, include it if and only if your compiler is not gcc. 4 - On Windows32 / MinGW, if all the tests fail, try to run the test suite with "make check EXEEXT=". 5 - To avoid using the Microsoft runtime (which might not be conform to ISO C), you can use the MinGW runtime package (which is an integral part of MinGW). For example, with MinGW versions 3.15 and later you can get an ISO-compliant printf() if you compile your application with either '-ansi', '-posix' or '-D__USE_MINGW_ANSI_STDIO'. For example, you can compile and test MPFR with CC="gcc -D__USE_MINGW_ANSI_STDIO". For example under Win32, the following problem has been experienced with MPFR 2.4.0 RC1 and the MSVC runtime (msvcrt.dll): Error in mpfr_vsprintf (s, "%.*Zi, %R*e, %Lf%n", ...); expected: "00000010610209857723, -1.2345678875e+07, 0.032258" got: "00000010610209857723, -1.2345678875e+07, -0.000000" FAIL: tsprintf.exe This error is due to the MSVC runtime not supporting the L length modifier for formatted output (e.g. printf with %Lf). You can check this with the following program: #include int main (void) { long double d = 1. / 31.; printf ("%Lf\n", d); return 0; } The expected output is 0.032258. Note: The L modifier has been standard for a long time (it was added in ISO C89). Notes on 64-bit Windows Applications (x64) ========================================== [See the Notes on 32-bit Windows Applications, which might be relevant here, in particular when running a 64-bit operating system] Cygwin and mingw do not yet offer support for native Windows 64 builds but the 32-bit version of MPFR can be used to build 32-bit applications that will run on 64-bit Windows systems (see above). MPFR can be built as a native 64-bit static or DLL library for Windows 64 using the Visual Studio build projects at http://fp.gladman.plus.com/computing/gmp4win.htm.