Sagittarius Scheme System
January 18, 2026 · View on GitHub
This is a Scheme implementation, supporting R6RS and R7RS specification.
How to build and install?
Sagittarius uses CMake for its building infrastructure. If you do not have it on your platform, please install it.
The minimum required version of CMake is 3.12. The older version may work but not guaranteed.
The runtime of Sagittarius is written in C. The C compiler must support C11 features.
Quick build/install (for Unix like environment)
If your environment already has required libraries and just want to
install to default location, run the following commands in the
directory where all distributed files are expanded (c.f. By default
it'd be sagittarius-X.X.X, X.X.X is the version you downloaded):
cmake .
make
make install
Following sections describes more details.
Preparation for Unix-like environment
Sagittarius depends on the following libraries.
If you are using Linux which supports apt, then you can simply
execute the following command:
apt install libgc-dev, zlib1g-dev libffi-dev libssl-dev libpam0g-dev
Manual installation of Boehm GC
For Boehm GC, you need to install it with the option
--enable-threads=pthreads. If your CPU is not incredibly old, you
can also specify the option --enable-parallel-mark.
If you are too lazy to download the archive file of GC, CMake will download it for you. Make sure to run the following commands from in GC directory:
./configure \
--enable-threads=pthreads \
--enable-parallel-mark \
--enable-large-config
make
make install
Note: most of the Linux distributions already have Boehm GC in their
package management system, such as apt-get. I recommend to use it
for security reason.
Building on Unix-like environment
After installing CMake and dependent libraries, you are ready to build Sagittarius; type the following command:
cmake .
Note: The above command assumes you are in the source directory.
It is possible to build Sagittarius in a directory that is not the top source directory of the distributed package (out-of-tree building); for example:
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ${path to Sagittarius' source directory}
make
To run the tests, specify test target.
make test
Or, alternatively, you can also use ctest. This is convenient to
test individual tests.
To install Sagittarius non default location, you need to specify
CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX variable.
cmake . -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/path/to/install
On some environment, there are 64 bits runtime specific directories
such as lib64. To install Sagittarius runtime in the directory, then
you can specify LIB_DIR variable as the following:
cmake . -DLIB_DIR=lib64
Then the runtime install directoy will be
CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX/LIB_DIR. There are also the variables to
specify bin, include and share directories, and the directory
for the .pc files; BIN_DIR, INCLUDE_DIR SHARE_DIR, and
PKGCONFIG_DIR, respectively.
Since 0.5.6, Sagittarius's REPL is renamed to sagittarius and legacy
sash is kept as a symbolic link. If you don't need the symbolic link
then you can put the INSTALL_SYMLINK option off as the following:
cmake . -DINSTALL_SYMLINK=0
After a successful compilation, it is possible to install Sagittarius
to the location specified by CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX or default system
location if it's not specified with the command:
make install
After installation, you might need to run ldconfig to run
Sagittarius properly.
Note: For some reason, you might want to build a 32-bit runtime on a 64-bit platform. The following command can be used for this purpose;
cmake . \
-DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=${your 32 bit C++ compiler} \
-DCMAKE_C_COMPILER={your 32 bit C compiler}
Make sure you have all the required 32-bit executables and libraries.
Building on Mac OS X
Only with Homebrew is tested. A user can install sagittarius directly with homebrew, via
brew install sagittarius-scheme
Alternately, the user can install the following dependencies and then make sagittarius locally.
Installing libffi, CMake, Boehm GC and OpenSSL.
brew install libffi cmake bdw-gc openssl
After installing dependent libraries, the rest of the process are the same as Unix-like environment.
If cmake can't find libffi, then you can specify the location via
FFI_LIBRARY_DIR option like the following.
cmake . -DFFI_LIBRARY_DIR=/opt/homebrew/Cellar/libffi/3.4.6/lib
Note: some Mac OS X environment may not be able to find ar command
because /usr/bin/gcc is identical as /usr/bin/clang. In that case,
export CC and CXX environment variable with proper GCC and G++
command path respectively so that CMake can find the command.
Building on FreeBSD
FreeBSD has multiple type of Boehm GC system libraries; gc,
gc-threaded and gc-redirect. Sagittarius requires threaded runtime
to make thread library works properly. The building process checks if
gc has GC_get_parallel() function and if it doesn't then tries to
use gc-threaded library. Please make sure your system has
gc-threaded or gc built with multi thread option.
NB: If you install gc without build option, then default is without
thread support. In such a case, you need to install gc-threaded as
well.
The command below installs the requried dependencies.
pkg install curl libffi boehm-gc-threaded cmake openssl bash
Building on OpenBSD
For OpenBSD, you can use pkg_add command to install dependencies.
You can use the command below to install the required components.
pkg_add -IUv curl libffi boehm-gc cmake bash gmake
NOTE: the command is expecting to be fresh environment.
Building on Windows (non Cygwin environment)
On Windows, you need to create an installer and Sagittarius is using innosetup for it. Please install it.
You need to install MSVC preferably Visual Studio 2019 or higher. Run
Visual Studio Command Prompt and go to the directory which Sagittarius
source codes are expanded.
For NMake
cmake . -G"NMake Makefiles"
nmake
nmake test
For Ninja
cmake . -G"Ninja"
ninja
For Ninja, you can build with multiple processor by specifying -j option.
For example:
rem This build Sagittarius with 8 processes
ninja -j8
After these commands, you move to the win/ directory and double
click the file innosetup.iss. Go to [Build] - [Compile], then it
will create the installer. For more detail, please see Inno Setup's
document.
Other Windows build tools
Experimentally, we support other build tools. Below are the supported ones:
- MSBuild
cmake . msbuild /p:Configuration=Release Sagittarius.sln
Supporting platform
| OS | x86 | amd64 | ARM64 | ARM | ppc64le |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Linux | ✅✔️ | ☑️✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | |
| macOS | ✅ | ||||
| FreeBSD | ✅ | ☑️ | |||
| OpenBSD | ✅ | ☑️ | |||
| Windows | ✅ | ✅ | ☑️ |
- ✅ Tested with CI
- ☑️ Tested locally
- ✔️ Docker image
Running test
The tests are executed via CTest. In case you want to have verbose output,
you can use ctest command. For example, the below command shows the output
of the test execution when the test failed.
ctest --output-on-failure
For more options, please refer the official document of the
CTest
Forums and bug reporting
If you have any question, please ask on the following Google group:
If you find a bug, please report it on the project bug tracking board:
Or you can report it on Google group.
How to develop it?
See HACKING.md file.