1 Some notes on platform support of Isabelle
2 ==========================================
7 The general programming model is that of a stylized ML + Scala + POSIX
8 environment, with hardly any system specific code in user-space tools
11 The basic Isabelle system infrastructure provides some facilities to
12 make this work, e.g. see the ML structures File and Path, or functions
13 like bash_output. The settings environment also provides some means
14 for portability, e.g. jvm_path to hold up the impression that even
15 Java on Windows/Cygwin adheres to Isabelle/POSIX standards.
17 When producing add-on tools, it is important to stay within this clean
18 room of Isabelle, and refrain from overly ambitious system hacking.
24 The following hardware and operating system platforms are officially
25 supported by the Isabelle distribution (and bundled tools):
33 As of Cygwin 1.7 there is only a 32 bit version of that platform. The
34 other 64 bit platforms become more and more important for power users
35 and always need to be taken into account when testing tools.
37 All of the above platforms are 100% supported -- end-users should not
38 have to care about the differences at all. There are also some
39 secondary platforms where Poly/ML also happens to work:
46 There is no guarantee that Isabelle add-ons work on these fringe
47 platforms. Even Isabelle/Scala already fails on ppc-darwin due to
48 lack of JVM 1.6 support on that platform.
51 Dependable system tools
52 -----------------------
54 The following portable system tools can be taken for granted:
56 * GNU bash as uniform shell on all platforms. Note that the POSIX
57 "standard" shell /bin/sh is *not* appropriate, because there are
58 too many different implementations of it.
60 * Perl as largely portable system programming language. In some
61 situations Python may as an alternative, but it usually performs
62 not as well in addressing various delicate details of basic
63 operating system concepts (processes, signals, sockets etc.).
65 * Scala with Java Runtime 1.6. The Isabelle/Pure.jar library irons
66 out many oddities and portability problems of the Java platform.
72 * Mac OS: If MacPorts is installed and its version of Perl takes
73 precedence over /usr/bin/perl in the PATH, then the end-user needs
74 to take care of installing add-on modules, e.g. HTTP support. Such
75 add-ons are usually included in Apple's /usr/bin/perl by default.
77 * The Java runtime has its own idea about the underlying platform,
78 e.g. on 64 bit machine Isabelle/ML could be x86-linux, but the JVM
79 could be x86_64-linux. This affects Java native libraries in
80 particular -- which are very hard to support in a platform
81 independent manner, and should be avoided in the first place.