2.5 Compiling from UNIX source

To compile and install a UNIX executable from a source release x.xx, first execute the commands:

tar -zxf asymptote-x.xx.tar.gz
cd asymptote-x.xx

Then put http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/gc_source/gc6.6.tar.gz in the current directory and

./configure
make all
make install

http://asymptote.sourceforge.net/asymptote.pdf

For a (default) system-wide installation, the last command should be done as root. The above steps will compile an optimized single-threaded static version of the Boehm garbage collector (http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/). Alternatively, one can request use of a (presumably multithreaded and therefore slower) system version of the Boehm garbage collector by configuring instead with ./configure --enable-gc=system. One can disable use of the garbage collector by configuring with ./configure --disable-gc. For a list of other configuration options, say ./configure --help.

If you are compiling Asymptote with gcc, you will need a relatively recent version (e.g. 3.2 or later). If you get errors compiling interact.cc, try installing an up-to-date version of the GNU readline library or else uncomment HAVE_LIBREADLINE in config.h.

The FFTW library is only required if you want Asymptote to be able to take Fourier transforms of data (say, to compute an audio power spectrum).

If you don't want to install Asymptote system wide, just make sure the compiled binary asy and GUI script xasy are in your path and set the environment variable ASYMPTOTE_DIR to point to the directory base (in the top level directory of the Asymptote source code).