For developers

Browse the open source files (CVS)

All of the files for the open source VPython project are available at sourceforge.net. Click on "Browse CVS Repository" to see the files. (Note: At sourceforge.net the project has the original name, visualpython.) The files for Visual 3 are in the vpython folder. The folder vpython-core2 contains the Visual 5 files.

Building VPython from source

To compile VPython from source on any platform (Windows, Linux/Unix, Macintosh), start by downloading the CVS files or the Linux package. For Linux, see the instructions in the HACKING.txt and INSTALL.txt files. For Windows, see VCbuild/VCBuild.txt. For Macintosh, see MAC-OSX.txt.

Here are notes on what was required to compile Visual on Windows using the gtkmm libraries that are also available on other platforms. This approach was overly complicated and has been abandoned. Building Visual from source is now done using Microsoft Visual Studio on Windows and a Carbon-based build on the Macintosh (this should be converted to being Cocoa-based, but no one seems to know how to do this, due to tricky threading issues).

One does need to find or create binaries of specific Boost libraries for Windows and Macintosh, to provide the glue between the Visual C++ code and Python. These are needed whether building using gtkmm or not. These binaries are now included in the CVS "dependencies" folder for Visual at sourceforge.