Posted on May 21, 2017 by Paul
On some systems, however, the GCC compiler may be used in conjunction with a non-GNU version of ar; for this reason, it’s best to run ranlib just to be safe. As you can see from Table 1-10, the Borland archiver tlib uses a slightly unusual syntax: the plus signs before the object files tell tlib to add these object files to the library. How to install the gcc compiler on a mac Hi, I was just wondering, I have been learning c on a mac and I have no way to compile my code. I need to know how to install gcc on my MacBook.
Updated 4 May 2019
In this tutorial, I will show you how to compile from source and install the current stable version of GCC with Graphite loop optimizations on your macOS computer. The instructions from this tutorial were tested with Xcode 10 and Mojave (macOS 10.14). If you are using Catalina (macOS 10.15) check this tutorial.
Mac Gcc Compile Library Software
Clang, the default compiler for macOS, supports only C, C++, Objective-C and Objective-C++. If you are interested in a modern Fortran compiler, e.g. you will need gfortran that comes with GCC. Another reason to have the latest stable version of GCC on your macOS is that it provides you with an alternative C and C++ compiler. Testing your code with two different compilers is always a good idea.
Building GCC 9 from sources could take some time, in my case it took about two hours on a MacBook Air with a 16GB of RAM. If you want to avoid the wait time or if you have any problem building from source, you can download my binary version.
In order to compile GCC from sources you will need a working C++ compiler. In the remaining of this article I will assume that you have installed the Command Line Tools for Xcode. At the time of this writing Apple’s Command Line Tools maps the gcc and g++ to clang and clang++. If you don’t have the Command Line Tools installed, open a Terminal and write:
which will guide through the installation process.
macOS Mojave changed the location of the system headers, this broke the GCC 9 build process. In order to build GCC install the required header files in the old location:
A window should open, double click the existing pkg file, and accept the defaults. This should solve the problem of the missing header files.
Let’s start by creating a working folder:
Next, we can download and extract the latest stable version of GCC:
GCC 9 depends on a couple of other libraries that can be downloaded with:
We will start by compiling and installing the gmp library:
We will do the same steps for mpfr now:
Now, we are going to build mpc:
Next step is to build the library for the Graphite loop optimizations:
We are ready to compile GCC now. Be prepared that this could take more than one hour on some machines … Since I’m interested only in the C, C++ and Fortran compilers, this is the configure command I’ve used on my machine:
The above command instructs the configure app where we have installed gmp, mpfr, mpc and isl; also it tells to add a prefix to all the resulting executable programs, so for example if you will invoke GCC 9.1.0 you will write gcc-9.1, the gcc command will invoke Apple’s version of clang.
If you are interested in building more compilers available in the GCC collection modify the –enable-languages configure option.
And now, the final touches:
Grab a coffee, maybe a book, and wait … this should take approximately, depending on your computer configuration, an hour … or more … and about 5.24GB of your disk space for the build folder.
Install the compiled gcc in /usr/local/gcc-9.1:
Now, you can keep the new compiler completely isolated from your Apple’s gcc compiler and, when you need to use it, just modify your path by writing in Terminal:
If you want to avoid writing the above command each time you open a Terminal, save the above command in the file .bash_profile from your Home folder, e.g:
You should be able to invoke any of the newly compiled compilers C, C++, Fortran …, invoking g++ is as simple as writing in your Terminal:
Remember to erase the working folder from your HOME if you want to recover some space:
Next, I’ll show you how to check if the compiler was properly installed by compiling and running a few examples. GCC 9 uses by default the C++14 standard and C11 for the C coders, you should be able to compile any valid C++14 code directly. In your favorite text editor, copy and save this test program (I’ll assume you will save the file in your Home directory):
Compiling and running the above lambda example:
We could also compile a C++ code that uses threads:
Next, we present a simple C++ code that uses regular expressions to check if the input read from stdin is a floating point number:
If you are a Fortran programmer, you can use some of the Fortran 2008 features like doconcurrent with gfortran-9.1:
The above code can be compiled with (assuming you’ve named it tst_concurrent_do.f90):
If you are interested in learning more about the new C++11/C++14 syntax I would recommend reading The C++ Programming Language by Bjarne Stroustrup.
or, Professional C++ by M. Gregoire, N. A. Solter, S. J. Kleper 2nd edition:
If you need to brush your Fortran knowledge a good book is Modern Fortran Explained by M. Metcalf, J. Reid and M. Cohen:
Mac Gcc Compile Library Software
