Warning

Experimental version — not the one to use

This repository is an experimental fork of Acmacs-E, kept for reference. It is not maintained, and its state is deliberately frozen.

Use acorg/ae instead.

Acmacs-E

Dependencies (general description)

System packages (on macOS, ./build.sh check verifies the formulae listed in BREW_FORMULAE in build.sh):

• Apple Clang (macOS, currently clang 21) / clang-14+ / g++-11
• ninja
• meson 1.4+ (needed for the Python 3.14 build; 1.11.1 in use — meson 1.1.0 fails because Python 3.14 removed distutils)
• cmake 3.18+ (to build lexy)
• pkg-config (meson uses it to find the system libraries below)
• libomp (OpenMP)
• brotli
• zlib 1.2.8+ (macOS: the SDK copy is used)
• libbz2 (optional)
• liblzma (xz)
• catch2 v3 (if no system copy is found, meson falls back to the vendored subprojects/catch2.wrap)
• cairo (used by tal-draw)
• Python 3.14 with headers, for the ae_backend extension (the .so is ABI-locked to the minor version it was built for)
• gnu-time (optional — build.sh only uses it to time the build)

C++ libraries — fmt, simdjson, pybind11, range-v3, xlnt, xxHash, alglib, lexy — are vendored as meson wraps in subprojects/ and fetched during meson setup; they need no separate install.

The Python package py/ae is pure-stdlib: there are no third-party Python dependencies.

Installing dependencies on macOS

• install homebrew https://brew.sh
• brew install meson ninja libomp cmake brotli zlib xz catch2 cairo pkgconf python@3.14
• optional: brew install gnu-time

Apple Silicon: use ./build.sh (below); the full native-arm64 toolchain background (Python 3.14, Apple Clang) is in CLAUDE.md. Do not use ./mk. Do not brew install llvm; Homebrew LLVM is incompatible with the vendored lexy subproject. Apple Clang (/usr/bin/clang++) is the correct compiler.

Installing dependencies on Ubuntu

Untested — nobody currently builds ae on Linux; this list is derived from meson.build, not from a verified build.

• sudo apt install g++-11 ninja-build cmake pkg-config python3-dev libbrotli-dev liblzma-dev zlib1g-dev libbz2-dev libcairo2-dev (with g++, OpenMP comes with the compiler; with clang also install libomp-dev)

• meson must be 1.4 or newer (check with meson --version); distribution packages are often older, in which case: pip3 install --user 'meson>=1.4'

• cmake must be 3.18 or newer (check with cmake --version); if the distribution's is older, install a current one with pip3 install --user cmake.

• catch2 is left to the vendored wrap; do not install a distribution catch2 v2 package, which meson would find and prefer.

Build

On macOS/Apple Silicon, use the self-checking build script — it runs preflight checks, generates the meson native file, configures, compiles, and verifies:

./build.sh          # configure (if needed) + compile; leaves build/ -> build-py314/
./build.sh check    # run preflight checks only (no build)
./build.sh -h       # all subcommands (clean, reconfigure, test)

build.sh uses Apple Clang (/usr/bin/clang++) and the Homebrew Python 3.14 — do not brew install llvm (Homebrew LLVM is incompatible with the vendored lexy subproject). It writes a .build-native.ini meson native file (gitignored). Override the interpreter/compiler/build-dir with the AE_PYTHON / AE_CXX / AE_BUILD_DIR environment variables. Full toolchain background is in CLAUDE.md.

The legacy ./mk script assumes Homebrew LLVM and does not work on the current Apple-Clang / Python-3.14 toolchain — prefer ./build.sh.

Use

After building, source the environment file to set AE_ROOT, PYTHONPATH (so import ae_backend and the bin/ tools work without per-command prefixes), and, if the sibling ../acmacs-data and ../whocc-tables are present, the runtime data variables (LOCDB_V2, HIDB_V5, SEQDB_V4, AC_CLADES_JSON_V2, WHOCC_TABLES_DIR):

source ae-env.sh
chart-relax -n 100 input.ace output.ace     # bin/ is now on PATH

Set ACMACS_DATA=/path/to/acmacs-data before sourcing if that repo lives elsewhere.