There are three main varieties of Larceny.

Native Larceny is the fastest and most convenient variety of Larceny. It compiles directly to native machine code for Intel x86-32 or SPARC microprocessors running Windows, Linux, MacOS X, or Solaris operating systems.

Petit Larceny compiles to C instead of machine code. It runs on most Unix machines, including PowerPC Macintoshes with MacOS X.

Common Larceny compiles to JIT-compiled IL on Microsoft's Common Language Runtime (CLR) or Mono. It provides access to the .NET libraries from Scheme.

The current versions of Larceny are available for download at Larceny's main web page.

Twobit and Larceny are distributed in two forms: as a precompiled binary, or as source code that can be used to reconstruct any of the precompiled binary distributions. Unless you intend to modify Larceny yourself, you do not need to download the source code.

If you are installing or running Common Larceny, please consult the Common Larceny User Manual instead of becoming confused by the instructions in this manual.

Unpack the distribution files with an appropriate command such as one of the following:

tar -xzf larceny-X.Y-bin-native-sparc-solaris.tar.gz
tar -xzf larceny-X.Y-bin-native-ia32-macosx.tar.gz
tar -xzf larceny-X.Y-bin-native-ia32-linux86.tar.gz
tar -xzf larceny-X.Y-bin-native-ia32-win32.tar.gz
tar -xzf larceny-X.Y-bin-petit-stdc-macosx.tar.gz
tar -xzf larceny-X.Y-src.tar.gz

That will create a directory with a similar name (but without the .tar.gz suffix) in your current working directory. That is the Larceny root directory, which you may rename to something shorter, such as larceny; the rest of this section will refer to it by that name.

Assuming you have unpacked a binary distribution, the larceny directory will contain the following files:

larceny.bin         Run-time system
larceny.heap        Heap image with all libraries, FFI, and compiler
larceny             Shell script that runs larceny.heap
scheme-script       Shell script that runs Scheme scripts
compile-stale       Scheme script that compiles ERR5RS/R6RS libraries
startup.sch         Pathnames for the require and autoload features

If you unpacked a binary distribution, then you should be able to run it immediately by making the larceny directory your current working directory and invoking ./larceny or perhaps just larceny.

If you unpacked the source code there will be many other files and directories, but larceny.bin and larceny.heap will not be present.

You may add the larceny directory to your standard path, or you may install Larceny into a directory that is already part of your standard path.

Suppose, for example, that you want to install Larceny in /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/lib/larceny. Copy larceny and scheme-script to /usr/local/bin and edit the definition of LARCENY_PATH at the head of each file to point to the correct directory:

LARCENY_PATH=/usr/local/lib/larceny

Then move the entire larceny directory to /usr/local/lib/larceny, or copy larceny.bin, larceny.heap, startup.sch, and the lib directory to /usr/local/lib/larceny.

You should now be able to run Larceny from any directory by typing "larceny" at a prompt.

Before you can run Larceny in ERR5RS or R6RS modes, you may have to compile the ERR5RS/R6RS runtime and standard libraries. This step is definitely required if you are using Petit Larceny or building any variety of Larceny from source code. With the prebuilt native varieties of Larceny, however, this step should not be necessary unless you change one of the files in lib/R6RS or lib/SRFI.

Compiling the ERR5RS/R6RS runtime and standard libraries is accomplished as follows:

    $ ./larceny
    Larceny v0.96 "Fluoridation" (...)
    > (require 'r6rsmode)
    > (larceny:compile-r6rs-runtime)
    > (exit)