Compiler version

The Factor VM is written in C++. It can be compiled with GCC, clang, or Microsoft's Windows SDK.

DLLs

If you came to this page because you got a message about a missing DLL, here's the actual link for you: http://downloads.factorcode.org/dlls/

SSE2 required on x86

Factor binary packages require an x86 CPU with SSE2. If you build from source, Factor will use SSE2 if its available, and fall back to x87 floating point otherwise. Expect somewhat lower performance on floating point code if x87 instructions are used, since Factor won't generate well-optimized code in this case.

Windows

Factor supports Windows XP and higher.

To compile Factor from source on Windows previously you could just install Microsoft's Windows 7 SDK. The SDK ships with Windows headers, libraries and command-line tools, including a C++ compiler. Note that the SDK will work on XP, Vista as well as Windows 7, despite having "7" in its name.

Unfortunately, the compiler in that SDK does not fully support the some of the C++ features which we now use, so you'll need at least Visual Studio 2012 to build Factor.

Mac OS X

Factor works on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and higher.

Linux

Factor requires a distribution with Linux kernel 2.6.

Factor will use X11 for the UI. For X11 support, you need development packages for X11, Pango, and OpenGL. On a Debian-derived Linux distribution (like Ubuntu), you can use the following line to grab everything:

sudo apt-get --yes install libc6-dev libpango1.0-dev libx11-dev xorg-dev libgtk2.0-dev gtk2-engines-pixbuf libgtkglext1-dev wget git git-doc rlwrap gcc g++ make

Note that if you are using a proprietary OpenGL driver, you should probably leave out the libgl1-mesa-dev package in the list.

FreeBSD

Factor requires FreeBSD 7.

OpenBSD

Factor requires OpenBSD 4.5.