Installing YAP

This page give pointers on where to download YAP binaries or sources, and how to compile it.

Downloading YAP

The latest development version of Yap-7 is available source-only through GIT repositories. The main reference repository is at

Please just use git clone to obtain the distribution. Ie, to download YAP from the command line please type:

git clone https://github.com/vscosta/yap

The first argument is the repository, the last argument is the (optional) target directory.

There are a variety of graphical interfaces to git, including GitHub's own GitHub Desktop that supports Microsoft Windows and Apple OSX. A list with GUI applications, editor integration, and much more can be found at the git Wiki,

Download Options

It may be useful to know:

  • If you are have limited bandwith or disk space, consider using git clone --depth XX to only include the last XX commits.

    • Older versions of YAP were distributed with modules. YAP-7.6.0xs is a single package, and it does not need git submodule.

  • The GitHub site includes a number of companion packages for YAP, including doxygen-yap, a version of doxygen adapted to Prolog that was used to generate these documents.

Compiling and Installing YAP

YAP-7.6.0 is a cmake based system. We use cmake because it supports mosts popular software, can generate Makefiles, Ninja, Apple's XCode, VisualStudio and ANdroid Studio, and because it includes packaging suppport. The steps required to install core YAP under cmake/Linux or cmake/OSX/brew are:

  1. Make sure you have a C/C++ compiler installed.

  2. Make sure you have readline and GMP compilation support:

  3. in debian, ubuntu and related you need the corresponding dev packages:
apt install libgmp-dev libreadline-dev
  • in RedHat, fedora you need the devel packages.
  • arch, gentoo should have it

  • brew: just install the packages.

  • Make a directory where you will compile YAP. Mote that cmake does not allow compiling on the yap main directory, and most often we use a sub-directory. An example:

mkdir yap/build
cd yap/build
  1. Configure yap:
cmake ..

Note that YAP searches for the libraries required by every package in the distribution. If  package libraries are missing, YAP should be able to still compile the rest of the system.

A number of flags are useful:
- `-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=` tells how to compile, say `Debug` or `Release`;
- `-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=` says where to install, say `/usr` for a system distribution, or `$HOME/.local` for a personal distribution.
- `-G` to use a different builder, such as `ninja`.
  1. Compile:
make

Useful flags include `-j` for parallel execution, and `-C` for setting a build directory.
  1. Install:
make install

In most systems you will need to be superuser in order to do `make install`  on the standard directories.

YAP Packages

We include a number of packages that are useful extensions to Prolog. Of these xml2yap, a proof of concept interface to XML data, and yap-lbfgs, an interface to LBFGS search, should just compile.

The myddas database-interface includes the SQLite3 code-base, so it should always compile.

Compiling and Installing the Python3 interface

You will need to first install python3-dev or devel and the interface generator swig. They are available in every Linux distribution and in brew.

The YAP to Python bridge should just build. The Python to YAP package needs to be compiled using:

pip install packages/python/yap4py

Recent Python forces you to use a virtual environment to install extra packages.

Compiling and Installing the GECODE interface.

GECODE is a constraint solving system, that supports constraints over integers, booleans, floats and sets. You need to install the corresponding library. In debian you will need to do: apt install libgecode-dev YAP should detect gecode and compile and install the interface.

Compiling and Installing Problog-1

This is an old version of Problog, which has some improvements in inference and in search. You will need cudd, a BDD library to do probabilistic inference. If not available in your distribution, you may have to download and compile it, say:

git clone https://github.com/ivmai/cudd.git
cd cudd
./configure --enable-shared --enable-dddmp --enable-obj --prefix=/usr
make
make install

Compiling and Installing the R interface