For developers: Building Gambit from source

This section covers instructions for building Gambit from source. This is for those who are interested in developing Gambit, or who want to play around with the latest features before they make it into a pre-compiled binary version.

This section requires at least some familiarity with programming. Most users will want to stick with binary distributions; see Downloading Gambit for how to get the current version for your operating system.

General information

Gambit uses the standard autotools mechanism for configuring and building. This should be familiar to most users of Un*ces and MacOS X. In general, you just need to unpack the sources, change directory to the top level of the sources (typically of the form gambit-0.yyyy.mm.dd), and do the usual

./configure
make
sudo make install

Command-line options are available to modify the configuration process; do ./configure –help for information.

By default Gambit will be installed in /usr/local. You can change this by replacing configure step with one of the form

./configure –prefix=/your/path/here

Note

The graphical interface relies on external calls to other programs built in this process, especially for the computation of equilibria. It is strongly recommended that you install the Gambit executables to a directory in your path!

Supported compilers

Currently, gcc is the only compiler supported. The version of gcc needs to be new enough to handle templates correctly. The oldest versions of gcc known to compile Gambit are 3.4.6 (Linux, Ubuntu) and 3.4.2 (MinGW for Windows, Debian stable).

If you wish to use another compiler, the most likely stumbling block is that Gambit uses templated member functions for classes, so the compiler must support these. (Version of gcc prior to 3.4 do not, for example.)

For 64-bit users

The program gambit-enumpoly does not compile on 64-bit systems. A new version of that program is being developed. It is currently being distributed separately on the Gambit website. In the meanwhile, to compile the other programs in Gambit, 64-bit users should add the switch –disable-enumpoly to the configuration step, e.g.

./configure --disable-enumpoly [other options here]

For Windows users

For Windows users wanting to compile Gambit on their own, you’ll need to use either the Cygwin or MinGW environments. We do compilation and testing of Gambit on Windows using MinGW, which can be gotten from http://www.mingw.org. We prefer MinGW over Cygwin because MinGW will create native Windows applications, whereas Cygwin requires an extra compatibility layer.

For OS X users

OS X users should being by following the Un*x/Linux instructions above. This will create the command-line tools, and the graphical interface binary called gambit. This graphical interface binary requires the X server to run correctly.

For a more native OS X experience, after completing the Un*x/Linux instructions, additionally issue the command

make osx-bundle

This will create a directory Gambit.app with the graphical interface in an application bundle. This bundle can then be copied (e.g., to /Applications) and used like any other OS X application.

Depending on which version of OS X you use, the version of wxWidgets that comes bundled may not be new enough to meet Gambit’s requirements. The version that shipped with OS X Tiger, for instance, is not. If you need to build wxWidgets yourself (see below), be sure to tell the ./configure step where to find the version you built by using the –with-wx-prefix parameter. For example, if you install wxWidgets into /usr/local (the default when you build it), configure Gambit with

./configure --with-wx-prefix=/usr/local

The graphical interface and wxWidgets

Gambit requires wxWidgets version 2.6.0 or higher for the graphical interface. See the wxWidgets website at http://www.wxwidgets.org to download this if you need it. Packages of this should be available for most Un*x users through their package managers (apt or rpm). Note that you’ll need the appropriate -dev package for wxWidgets to get the header files needed to build Gambit.

Un*x users, please note that Gambit at this time only supports the GTK port of wxWidgets, and not the Motif/Lesstif or the Universal ports. Neither of the latter ports support drag-and-drop features, which are heavily used in the graphical interface.

If wxWidgets it isn’t installed in a standard place (e.g., /usr or /usr/local), you’ll need to tell configure where to find it with the –with-wx-prefix=PREFIX option, for example:

./configure --with-wx-prefix=/home/mylogin/wx

Finally, if you don’t want to build the graphical interface, you can either (a) simply not install wxWidgets, or (b) pass the argument –disable-gui to the configure step, for example,

./configure --disable-gui

This will just build the command-line tools, and will not require a wxWidgets installation.