The Runtime Emulator

The sources may be used to built two versions of the emulator. By default, the development emulator is built. This emulator contains all features for interactive development of Prolog applications. If the system is configured using --enable-runtime, make will create a runtime version of the emulator. This emulator is equivalent to the development version, except for the following features:

No input editing The GNU library -lreadline that provides EMACS compatible editing of input lines will never be linked to the system. No tracer The tracer and all its options are removed, making the system a little bit faster too. No profiler profile/3 and friends are not supported. This saves some space and provides a bit better performance. No interrupt Keyboard interrupt (Control-C normally) is not rebound and will normally terminate the application. feature(runtime, true) succeeds This may be used to verify your application is running in the runtime environment rather than the development environment. clause/[2,3] do not work on static predicates This feature inhibits listing your program. It is only a very limited protection however.

The following fragment is an example for building the runtime environment in $HOME/lib/rt-pl-2.1.4. If possible, the shared-library interface should be configured to ensure it can serve a large number of applications.

% cd pl-2.1.4
% mkdir runtime
% cd runtime
% ../src/configure --enable-runtime --enable-shared --prefix=$HOME
% make
% make rt-install

The runtime directory contains the components listed below. This directory may be tar'ed and shipped with your application.