Installation

Binary releases

The latest binary releases of the kOS-C compiler for Windows and Linux can be obtained from the GitHub repository. The zip files contain the compiler binary itself as well as a “prelude” library that contains the bindings to kOS and some common functionality that might be useful.

Be aware that the Linux binaries are compiled on Arch Linux and might not work on other distributions. Moreover, I can only provide 64 bit builds at the moment. If the binaries are incompatible with your system, proceed to the next section in order to learn how to compile kOS-C yourself.

Build Instructions

The compiler is written in Haskell, but since the project is compatible with Stack, it should be fairly easy to compile. Assuming that stack has been installed according to the linked documentation, the following steps need to be done.

  1. Clone the kOS-C source code from the GitHub repository.
    • The master branch contains the source code corresponding to the latest release.
    • The develop branch contains the current development version of kOS-C, and therefore might be less usable and contain more bugs.
    • There are tags corresponding to every release so far.
  2. Open a terminal/command prompt and change into the root directory of the repository cloned in the first step.
  3. If you never used Haskell before, or do not have GHC [1] 8.0.2 installed and configured stack to use it, you can install it by executing stack setup. Stack will install GHC into a local directory where it will not interfere with any system wide installations.
  4. Once GHC is installed, you can issue stack build in order to build kOS-C.
  5. If everything went well, an executable named koscc (the kOS-C Compiler) can now be found in a sub-directory of .stack-work/install/ whose exact name depends on the system architecture and operating system.
    • Optionally, you can use stack install in order to let stack copy the executable into the local user’s binary directory. On Linux, that is usually ~/.local/bin, on Windows %APPDATA%\local\bin.
    • Another option is to use the command stack exec koscc to run the generated executable from within the project directory. Any arguments that are meant for kOS-C must be separated with two dashes (--) from the rest of the command line, i.e. stack exec koscc -- arguments go here.
[1]The Glasgow Haskell Compiler