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Building GCC from source
Fri May 8 02:36:29 IST 2020
GCC 10 released on 07-May-2020, and I was excited to test it out.
I had to build it from source since none of the package managers had GCC 10.1 available. You can use the steps if you want to build the latest release from source, or even try any older version.
This was tested on macOS Catalina, but the instructions should work the same with other GNU/Linux systems too!
Note: The official instructions can be found here, but I wish to demonstrate a friendlier way(without mentioning all the optional parameters) to install from source.
Important: Building from source releases, requires you to already have a C++ compiler installed.
Steps Overview
- Download the source
- Collect pre-requisites
- Configure
- Build
- Install
1. Downloading the source
The easiest way to fetch gcc’s source code is to clone the git repository. (Note: You will need to have git installed on your machine.)
git clone git://gcc.gnu.org/git/gcc.git gcc-10
git checkout releases/gcc-10
Alternatively, you can also download gcc from one of it’s mirrors, and extract it.
- mirrors: https://gcc.gnu.org/mirrors.html
- Navigate to
releases/gcc-x.y.z/and download the tar file.
2. Collecting pre-requisites
The source release comes with handy shell script to download pre-requisites. You may simply run the contrib/download_prerequisites script in the GCC source directory to set up everything.
cd gcc-10
./contrib/download_prerequisites
3. Configuring
Like most GNU software, GCC must be configured before it can be built. For this tutorial, we will only look at the configuration procedure for building it natively.
GCC recommends that GCC be built into a separate directory from the sources which does not reside within the source tree. Hence, let’s make a new directory called gcc_build which lies in the same directory that contains gcc-10.
parent-dir
├── gcc-10
└── gcc_build
Once the directory is created, we need to cd into it, and call the configure script present in the gcc-10/ source directory.
cd gcc_build
../gcc-10/configure
There are multiple options you can specify during the ‘configure’ phase, but I’ve skipped it for brevity. Options can be found here.
4. Building
After the configuration process, you will find that it has placed a Makefile in your build directory. To build, all we have to do is to run the make command.
Note: You may change 2 to the number of cores present on your machine.
make -j 2
This will take several hours to build. When you use make in multi-threaded mode, i.e. using the -j option, you may lose error messages due to other threads outputting beyond the error. In this case, omit the -j x option to debug the output.
You can optionally test your build by following the guide here.
5. Installing
Once the source release is successfully built, it is time to move the binaries to it’s right location (somewhere in $PATH) so we can invoke it from the shell without it’s full path.
Just the run the following command to install the binaries in /usr/local directory. This is the default installation directory prefixed during the ‘configure’ phase.
cd gcc_build && make install
Running
To check if gcc has properly installed, run the gcc -v command to see if the right gcc version was installed.
Make sure /usr/local/bin is present in your $PATH.
Conclusion
I hope this article helped you in building GCC from source. Please reach out if you run into any problems you can’t figure out!