Assumptions and Prerequisites

This assumes that JAVA_HOME is set to a Java 8 compatible SDK.

You will also need Ant 1.10.2 or better, as well as g++ 4.4 or better (optionally xlC 11.1 or better), binutils, wget, and GNU make.

Note for Linux users: The X10 build uses the javah task, which is not included in the default ant package. You would need to install ant-nodeps (on RedHat/Gentoo-based systems) or ant-optional (on Debian/SuSE-based systems).

Note for MacOS users: The default Java installation on recent versions of MacOS is not a complete JDK even if it comes with the javac compiler. You must install a proper JDK to build X10 from sources, that is, a Java 8 JDK from Oracle. If JAVA_HOME is not set, the build will use the preferred Java installation as returned by /usr/libexec/java_home.

Note for Windows users: You can build X10 within the cygwin environment. The minimum Cygwin version required to build X10 is 1.7.1, as Cygwin releases prior to 1.7.1 broke the shared library behavior of g++ 4.3.2.  Make sure you have these packages:  gcc, g++, wget, make, binutils, diffutils, libtool, git, patch, time. If you are running a 64-bit build of Windows 10, you can also build X10 using the Windows Subsystem for Linux Ubuntu image.

Getting the source

If you are building from a source code release, simply untar or unzip it.  If not, clone the X10 GitHub repository:

git clone git@github.com:x10-lang/x10.git

Now that you have all the source; build it by doing:

cd x10/x10.dist
ant dist

See section below for arguments you may wish to pass to ant.

Updating and rebuilding

To refresh the code from git, do

cd x10; git pull

After updating your code from git, you probably need to do a fairly complete rebuild.

cd x10/x10.dist
ant squeakyclean dist

Optional arguments to ant

If you want to build a maximally optimized versions of the class libraries, supply the arguments -D NO_CHECKS=true -Doptimize=true  i.e. run

 ant -DNO_CHECKS=true -Doptimize=true squeakyclean dist

NO_CHECKS=true ensures that no constraint type-checks and array bounds checks are performed at run time.
You can also build fairly optimized, but still safe, class libraries by just using -Doptimize=true.

To disable GC, supply the argument -DDISABLE_GC=true. Note that on all platfroms except AIX, GC is enabled by default. GC is not currently supported on AIX.

To build faster, supply -Davailable.procs=n, where n is the number of cores you want to use for the build (default=2).

If you want to use the MPI runtime, supply -DX10RT_MPI=true. For PAMI support, set -DX10RT_PAMI=true. See X10RT Implementations for more details on these.

Example: checkout and compile the entire source code on Windows

• Install cygwin to directory c:\cygwin,
  with the packages: gcc (all of them), wget, make, binutils, libtool, git, patch.
• Download Apache Ant to C:\cygwin\home\USERNAME\apache-ant-1.10.5 (version 1.10.5 is current as of this writing, but be sure to use a path that corresponds to the version you downloaded).
• checkout the source code:
  git clone git@github.com:x10-lang/x10.git C:/cygwin/home/USERNAME/x10
• Edit the file C:\cygwin\home\USERNAME\.bash_profile
  And add:

  if [ -d "${HOME}/bin" ] ; then
        PATH=${HOME}/bin:${PATH}
  fi
  PATH=${HOME}/apache-ant-1.8.0/bin:${HOME}/x10/x10.dist/bin:${PATH}
  export CYGWIN="nodosfilewarning"
  LC_ALL=C
  LANG=C
     

  Create a bin directory: C:\cygwin\home\USERNAME\bin
  and add a file there called: x10make
  with the content:

     #!/bin/sh
     cd ~
     cd x10
     git pull
     cd x10.dist
     ant squeakyclean dist