To install you can either build the source or download constanc.byte. We recommend to build from source if possible.
constanc.byte is the executable used to compile Constantc programs. Execute ./constanc.byte for a list of the command line options.
Run ./constanc.byte ex.const to compile a Constantc program where ex.const is the name of your file.
Many debugging options and intermediate data structures are available. Run ./constanc.byte -help for all options.
Constantc is developed using Ocaml and LLVM 3.8. Make sure both of these are installed. On OS X it can be done with brew.
brew install ocaml
brew install llvm38
We also need dependency management for Ocaml.
brew install opam
Then we need the actual dependencies for Ocaml.
opam install llvm.3.8 core ounit ctypes-foreign utop dolog menhir oasis
If you have not setup oasis, then you must do that first.
oasis setup
Then we must configure oasis.
make configure
Finally we can build the compiler.
make build
If you want to add a dependency, add it to _oasis, then run the 3 previous commands again.
This will give us the constanc.byte executable.
To install constanc, run the command
make install
This will add constanc to your path so that you can compile const files with the command,
constanc
Constantc is designed to be called from C code. In order to do so, write your constanc functions and compile them. This will output an object file. This can then be linked to a C file. A full working example is in the example directory. First, we must compile main.c in the example directory:
cd example/
clang -c main.c
Then we compile ex.const using constanc. This requires clang to use version ≥3.8:
../constanc.byte ex.const
Next, we link them together:
clang -o final main.o ex.o
Finally, we can run the executable:
./final