1 CVC4 prerelease version 1.7.
3 ** Quick-start instructions
5 *** Supported operating systems
7 CVC4 can be built on Linux and macOS. For Windows, CVC4 can be cross-compiled
8 using Mingw-w64. We recommend a 64-bit operating system.
10 On macOS, we recommend using Homebrew (https://brew.sh/) to install the
11 dependencies. We also have a Homebrew Tap available at
12 https://github.com/CVC4/homebrew-cvc4 .
14 *** Build dependencies
16 The following tools and libraries are required to build and run CVC4.
17 Versions given are minimum versions; more recent versions should be
20 GNU C and C++ (gcc and g++) or Clang, reasonably recent versions
23 GMP v4.2 (GNU Multi-Precision arithmetic library)
24 libantlr3c v3.2 or v3.4 (ANTLR parser generator C support library)
25 The Boost C++ base libraries
27 Some features, such as the theory of floating-point numbers, require optional
28 dependencies, please refer to the section "Optional dependencies" below for
31 If "make" is non-GNU on your system, make sure to invoke "gmake" (or
32 whatever GNU Make is installed as). If your usual shell is not Bash,
33 the configure script should auto-correct this. If it does not, you'll
34 see strange shell syntax errors, and you may need to explicitly set
35 SHELL or CONFIG_SHELL to the location of bash on your system.
37 *** Installing libantlr3c: ANTLR parser generator C support library
39 For libantlr3c, you can use the convenience script in
40 contrib/get-antlr-3.4. This will download, patch, and install
41 libantlr3c. On a 32-bit machine, or if you have difficulty building
42 libantlr3c (or difficulty getting CVC4 to link against it later), you
43 may need to remove the --enable-64bit part in the script. (If you're
44 curious, the manual instructions are at
45 http://cvc4.cs.stanford.edu/wiki/Developer%27s_Guide#ANTLR3 .)
47 *** Installing the Boost C++ base libraries
49 A Boost package is available on most Linux distributions and Homebrew; check
50 yours for a package named something like libboost-dev or boost-devel. There
51 are a number of additional Boost packages in some distributions, but this
52 "basic" one should be sufficient for building CVC4.
54 Should you want to install Boost manually, or to learn more about the
55 Boost project, please visit http://www.boost.org/.
57 *** Optional dependencies
59 None of these is required, but can improve CVC4 as described below:
61 Optional: SymFPU (an implementation of SMT-LIB/IEEE-754 floating-point
62 operations in terms of bit-vector operations)
63 Optional: CaDiCaL (optional SAT solver)
64 Optional: CryptoMiniSat (optional SAT solver)
65 Optional: LFSC (the LFSC proof checker)
66 Optional: SWIG 3.0.x (Simplified Wrapper and Interface Generator)
67 Optional: CLN v1.3 or newer (Class Library for Numbers)
68 Optional: glpk-cut-log (A fork of the GNU Linear Programming Kit)
69 Optional: ABC library (for improved bitvector support)
70 Optional: GNU Readline library (for an improved interactive experience)
71 Optional: The Boost C++ threading library (libboost_thread)
72 Optional: CxxTest unit testing framework
74 SymFPU is required for supporting the theory of floating-point numbers. It can
75 be installed using the contrib/get-symfpu script. Use --with-symfpu when
76 configuring CVC4 to build with the dependency.
78 CaDiCaL is a SAT solver that can be used for solving non-incremental bit-vector
79 problems when using eager bit-blasting. This dependency may improve
80 performance. It can be installed using the contrib/get-cadical script. Use
81 --with-cadical when configuring CVC4 to build with this dependency.
83 CryptoMiniSat is a SAT solver that can be used for solving bit-vector problems
84 when using eager bit-blasting. This dependency may improve performance. It can
85 be installed using the contrib/get-cryptominisat script. Use
86 --with-cryptominisat when configuring CVC4 to build with this dependency.
88 LFSC is required to check proofs internally with --check-proofs. It can be
89 installed using the contrib/get-lfsc script. Use --with-lfsc when configuring
90 CVC4 to build with this dependency.
92 SWIG is necessary to build the Java API (and of course a JDK is
93 necessary, too). SWIG 1.x/2.x won't work; you'll need 3.0, and the more
94 recent the better. See "Language bindings" below for build instructions.
96 CLN is an alternative multiprecision arithmetic package that can offer
97 better performance and memory footprint than GMP. CLN is covered by
98 the GNU General Public License, version 3; so if you choose to use
99 CVC4 with CLN support, you are licensing CVC4 under that same license.
100 (Usually CVC4's license is more permissive than GPL is; see the file
101 COPYING in the CVC4 source distribution for details.) Please visit
102 http://www.ginac.de/CLN/ for more details about CLN.
104 glpk-cut-log is a fork of GLPK (the GNU Linear Programming Kit).
105 This can be used to speed up certain classes of problems for the arithmetic
106 implementation in CVC4. (This is not recommended for most users.) The source
107 code for glpk-cut-log is available at:
108 https://github.com/timothy-king/glpk-cut-log/
109 The only option for installation of glpk-cut-log is downloading the library,
110 compiling and installing it manually. CVC4 is no longer compatible with the
111 main GLPK library. GLPK and glpk-cut-log are covered by the GNU General Public
112 License, version 3; so if you choose to use CVC4 with GLPK support, you are
113 licensing CVC4 under that same license.
114 (Usually CVC4's license is more permissive; see above discussion.)
115 Please visit http://www.gnu.org/software/glpk/ for more details about GLPK.
117 ABC: A System for Sequential Synthesis and Verification is a library
118 for synthesis and verification of logic circuits. This can be used to
119 speed up the eager bit-vector solver by first encoding the bit-blasted
120 formula into AIG format and then using ABC to simplify the AIG. To
121 install abc run the contrib/get-abc script which will download and
122 install a compatible version of ABC in the cvc4 directory. To configure
123 CVC4 to use abc configure with --with-abc and --with-abc-dir=PATH, where
124 PATH corresponds to the install path of ABC. To run CVC4 using ABC use
125 the --bitblast-aig command line argument.
126 Please visit http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~alanmi/abc/ for more details
129 The GNU Readline library is optionally used to provide command
130 editing, tab completion, and history functionality at the CVC prompt
131 (when running in interactive mode). Check your distribution for a
132 package named "libreadline-dev" or "readline-devel" or similar. This
133 library is covered by the GNU General Public License, version 3. Like
134 the above-mentioned libraries, if you choose to use CVC4 with readline
135 support, you are licensing CVC4 under that same license. (Please visit
136 http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/php/chet/readline/rltop.html for more
137 details about readline.)
139 The Boost C++ threading library (often packaged independently of the
140 Boost base library) is needed to run CVC4 in "portfolio"
141 (multithreaded) mode. Check your distribution for a package named
142 "libboost-thread-dev" or similar.
144 CxxTest is necessary to run CVC4's unit tests (included with the
145 distribution). Running these is not really required for users of
146 CVC4; "make check" will skip unit tests if CxxTest isn't available,
147 and go on to run the extensive system- and regression-tests in the
148 source tree. However, if you're interested, you can download CxxTest
149 at http://cxxtest.com/ .
153 Once the build dependencies are satisfied, you should be able to configure,
154 make, make check, and make install without incident:
156 ./autogen.sh [not required when building from a source distribution]
157 ./configure [use --prefix to specify a prefix; default /usr/local
158 use --with-* to use optional dependencies]
160 make check [optional but a good idea!]
162 To build from a repository checkout (rather than a distributed CVC4
163 tarball), there are additional dependencies; see below.
165 You can then "make install" to install in the prefix you gave to
166 the configure script (/usr/local by default). ** You should run
167 "make check" ** before installation to ensure that CVC4 has been
168 built correctly. In particular, GCC version 4.5.1 seems to have a
169 bug in the optimizer that results in incorrect behavior (and wrong
170 results) in many builds. This is a known problem for MiniSat, and
171 since MiniSat is at the core of CVC4, a problem for CVC4. "make check"
172 easily detects this problem (by showing a number of FAILed test cases).
173 It is ok if the unit tests aren't run as part of "make check", but all
174 system tests and regression tests should pass without incident.
176 To build API documentation, use "make doc". Documentation is produced
177 under doc/ but is not installed by "make install".
179 Examples and tutorials are not installed with "make install." You may
180 want to "make install-examples". See below.
182 For more information about the build system itself (probably not
183 necessary for casual users), see the Appendix at the bottom of this
186 *** Language bindings
188 There are several options available for using CVC4 from the API.
190 First, CVC4 offers a complete and flexible API for manipulating
191 expressions, maintaining a stack of assertions, and checking
192 satisfiability, and related things. The C++ libraries (libcvc4.so and
193 libcvc4parser.so) and required headers are installed normally via a
194 "make install". This API is also available from Java (via CVC4.jar
195 and libcvc4jni.so) by configuring with --enable-language-bindings=java.
196 You'll also need SWIG 2.0 installed (and you might need to help
197 configure find it if you installed it in a nonstandard place with
198 --with-swig-dir=/path/to/swig/installation). You may also need to
199 give the configure script the path to your Java headers (in
200 particular, jni.h). You might do so with (for example):
202 ./configure --enable-language-bindings=java \
203 JAVA_CPPFLAGS=-I/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk-amd64/include
205 The examples/ directory includes some basic examples (the "simple vc" family of
206 examples) of all these interfaces.
208 In principle, since we use SWIG to generate the native Java API, we
209 could support other languages as well. However, using CVC4 from other
210 languages is not supported, nor expected to work, at this time. If
211 you're interested in helping to develop, maintain, and test a language
212 binding, please contact one of the project leaders.
214 *** Building CVC4 from a repository checkout
216 CVC4's main repository is kept on GitHub at:
218 https://github.com/CVC4/CVC4
220 and there are numerous experimental forks housed on GitHub as well,
221 by different developers, implementing various features.
223 The following tools and libraries are additionally required to build
224 CVC4 from from a repository checkout rather than from a prepared
227 Automake v1.11 or later
228 Autoconf v2.61 or later
229 Libtool v2.2 or later
233 First, use "./autogen.sh" to create the configure script. Then proceed as
234 normal for any distribution tarball. The parsers are pre-generated for the
235 tarballs, but don't exist in the repository; hence the extra ANTLR3 requirement
236 to generate the source code for the parsers, when building from the repository.
237 Similarly, Python is required for generating some of the code.
239 *** Examples and tutorials are not built or installed
241 Examples are not built by "make" or "make install". See
242 examples/README for information on what to find in the examples/
243 directory, as well as information about building and installing them.
245 *** Appendix: Build architecture
247 The build system is generated by automake, libtool, and autoconf. It
248 is somewhat nonstandard, though, which (for one thing) requires that
249 GNU Make be used. If you ./configure in the top-level source
250 directory, the objects will actually all appear in
251 builds/${arch}/${build_id}. This is to allow multiple, separate
252 builds in the same place (e.g., an assertions-enabled debugging build
253 alongside a production build), without changing directories at the
254 shell. The "current" build is maintained until you re-configure.
256 You can also create your own build directory inside or outside of the
257 source tree and configure from there. All objects will then be built
258 in that directory, and you'll ultimately find the "cvc4" binary in
259 src/main/, and the libraries under src/ and src/parser/.