Scribe Compiler Installation

Prerequisites

  • CMake build system (>= 3.21.1)
  • C++17 standard conforming compiler (GCC, LLVM, etc.)

Steps

  1. Clone the Scribe repository - scribe-lang/scribe
  2. Go to the cloned repository and create a build directory.
  3. Go into the build directory and invoke the build commands:
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release && make -j install
  1. This will install the compiler and its libraries in $PREFIX_DIR diectory (default: $HOME/.scribe).
  2. To run the compiler without specifying the path, add $PREFIX_DIR/bin to $PATH.
  3. That's it! The scribe compiler is now ready for use.

CMake Environment Variables

$CXX

This variable is used for specifying the C++ compiler if you do not want to use the ones auto decided by the script, which uses g++ by default for all operating systems except Android and BSD, for which it uses clang++.

For example, to explicitly use clang++ compiler on an ubuntu (linux) machine, you can use:

CXX=clang++ cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release && make install

$PREFIX_DIR

This variable will allow you to set a PREFIX_DIR directory for installation of the language after the build.

NOTE that once the script is run with a PREFIX_DIR, manually moving the generated files to desired directories will not work since Scribe's codebase uses this PREFIX_DIR internally itself.

Generally, the /usr or /usr/local directories are used for setting the PREFIX_DIR, however that is totally up to you. Default value for this is $HOME/.scribe.

Scribe compiler binary can be found as $PREFIX_DIR/bin/scribe.

An example usage is:

PREFIX_DIR=/usr/local cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release && make install

That concludes the compiler installation! Now you're ready to compile scribe programs, and we can start writing our first program: Hello World!