Compiling wxCLIPS

If there are binaries available for your platform, you probably won't want to recompile wxCLIPS (CLIPS is already compiled into wxCLIPS). It's a somewhat tortuous process.

However, you may wish to recompile wxCLIPS if:

There isn't a binary for your platform;
you wish to update CLIPS or wxCLIPS code, or add user functions;
you wish to embed wxCLIPS in an application;
you're just curious, or a masochist :-)

Apart from this page, here are other sources of advice:

Russell Deich's notes for compiling with VC++ 4.0

What you will need

First you need to grab source code for the following:

wxCLIPS. This is sometimes included in the binary distribution, but if not, it can be downloaded here - choose the latest file.
wxExtend. This is a library that recasts a subset of wxWidgets classes into C functions, to act as the glue between wxWidgets and CLIPS (which is only extensible via C user functions). This is included in the wxCLIPS source archive (above).
wxWidgets. This is a free C++ cross-platform GUI library which provides the GUI layer for wxCLIPS. Get the latest version from here - again, choose the latest version.
CLIPS. You have the choice of:
1. Downloading the source from the CLIPS site, and patching with the few files that wxCLIPS alters (in the wxCLIPS distribution under the clips6.0 directory).
2. Downloading the whole source from here (CLIPS) or here (FuzzyCLIPS).
Note: to use wxFuzzyCLIPS commercially, you need to get a licence from NRC.

Compiling CLIPS

If you have downloaded CLIPS from somewhere other than the AIAI site, copy the files from the wxCLIPS distribution's clips6.0 subdirectory to the CLIPS source directory before compiling. In this case, ensure you have the patched version of CLIPS from 1996.
Edit setup.h to suit your environment and compiler.
Invoke the makefile, e.g. provided by myself: for VC++ 4.0, it's makefile.nt. For VC++ 1.5, it's makefile.dos. For UNIX, it's makefile.unx.
If all goes well, a file with a name similar to clips.lib or libclips.a should be produced.

Compiling wxWidgets

Please follow the instructions in install.txt. If you have problems, the wxWidgets or wxCLIPS mailing lists may be able to help.

Compiling wxExtend

Unarchive wxExtend under the wxWidgets utils/wxextend directory, so the source is in utils/wxextend/src.

Compile using one of the makefiles provided, or if your compiler is not supported, construct one. If making your own makefile or project file, please look at the other makefiles to see what other components should be compiled (such as wxGrid, wxImage).

Compiling wxCLIPS

The makefiles assume that wxCLIPS is unarchived below the utils directory of wxWidgets, e.g. c:\wx\utils\wxclips\src.

Compile using one of the makefiles provided, or if your compiler is not supported, construct one. Again, if making your own makefile or project file, please look at the other makefiles to see what other components should be compiled, and also what symbols should be defined, such as WXCLIPS.

For compiling with a Microsoft compiler, the 'full' target should be used.

Note that wxCLIPS expects CLIPS to be in a suitable directory - edit the makefile to find out where it expects CLIPS to be (by default, c:\clips6.0, with lib and src subdirectories). If an include file or library file isn't found, check that you've specified the right CLIPS directory.

If FuzzyCLIPS is to be compiled, some of the makefiles allow FUZZY=1 to be specified on the make command line, or if that doesn't work, set the CLIPSDIR environment variable from DOS to e.g. c:\fuzzy before compiling.

When the wxclips.exe file has been sucessfully compiled, remove the debugging information by deleting wxclips.exe and compiling with FINAL=1 on the command line (again, Microsoft makefiles only).

On UNIX, use the strip command to remove debugging information.

Further details

It's possible to compile the wxWidgets library as a shared library on some UNIX systems. Please see the contrib/wxshlib directory in the wxWidgets distribution for scripts to achieve this.

Back to the wxCLIPS home page