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Windows-installation

Installing ACL2 on Windows

Windows users will probably want to do one of the following to install and run ACL2 on their systems. Thanks to David Rager for his help with this topic.

  • Use a Virtual Machine platform, such as VMware Player (free for non-commercial use) or Oracle Virtualbox (free even for commercial use) to install Linux, and then follow the normal installation instructions to install ACL2. As of 2014, at least a couple of our power users are very happy with this solution, as it provides first-class access to utilities relevant to maintaining the ACL2 system and books (like GNU Make and perl).
  • Set up Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) on a 64-bit version of Windows 10 (or later, once available). Within that subsystem, follow the setup and installation instructions for ACL2. See the below section regarding the ACL2 Sedan Windows installation instructions for more info, as that involves installing the ACL2 Sedan in WSL on Windows.
  • Use the ACL2 Sedan (ACL2s) Windows installation instructions — see ACL2s::ACL2s-installation for more details. This will install ACL2 and the ACL2s system (including a copy of the Eclipse IDE with ACL2s support) in a Windows Subsystem for Linux distro. This distro is configured to automatically open Eclipse when the distro starts up, but one can start the distro without Eclipse by running wsl -d acl2s -e /bin/bash --noprofile.

You are welcome to obtain a Windows installer for a previous ACL2 release, which mimics some of Linux and provides Emacs. Updated ACL2 binaries have been successfully installed in such an environment.

Here are links to some older documentation topics, possibly out of date, that provide additional information for installing ACL2 on Windows.

  • See windows-installation-gcl for building an executable image on a Windows system using GCL
  • Click here for some older instructions for building ACL2 on Windows.
  • Click here for yet older instructions for building ACL2 on Windows using mingw.

Subtopics

Windows-installation-gcl
Building an executable image on a Windows system using GCL