Choir Compiler Toolchain

The Choir project aims to implement "standard" Laye compiler tooling in a way that can easily be bootstrapped on most systems.

These projects are very work-in-progress as the temporary bootstrap compiler is under rapid development to experiment with the language and naturally discover what Laye wants to be. The formal documentation and language standard will come as a result of those efforts, and the future Laye compilers (this one included, of course) will be built to that standard. Check back on each of these projects frequently to see how development is progressing.

Building from source

This project is built with the help of nob, a single-header C library designed for building projects with nothing but a C compiler.

Bootstrap a build system

The project root directory contains the following relevant files and directories for configuring a build environment:

1. nob.h: The nob library file itself.
2. config.c: The build configuration tool source which depends on nob.
3. configurations/: A directory containing default supported build configurations as C header files.

To get started, compile the config.c source file with no additional flags:

On Windows, use of MSVC is supported:

> cl /Fo:config.exe config.c

But you can also use any C compiler of your choice. We recommend installing Clang, either through Visual Studio or a prebuilt binary package, for a more intuitive development experience on Windows without relying on additional systems such as MinGW.

On Linux, any old C compiler will do the trick. We just use cc:

$ cc -o config config.c

NOTE: The resulting executable file is self-rebuilding if ever you change it, so long as it recognized your platform correctly. See the NOB_REBUILD_URSELF macro in nob.h for what command it will infer to recompile itself.

Once you've built the config executable, run it from your terminal. It should print some simple help information instructing you to specify the name of a configuration file to use. Pass in a relevant configuration header file path for your system, such as configurations/x86_64-unknown-linux-clang.h, to generate a build directory for that configuration. Build directories are generated at build/<configuration-name>, where the configuration name is the file name you specified without extensions or parent directories included.

$ ./config configurations/x86_64-unknown-linux-clang.h

Navigate to the newly created build directory to continue the build process.

$ cd build/x86_64-unknown-linux-clang

Build the configured build tool

In the build directory is a copy of the nob.h header and a newly created nob.c, copied from the nob.template.c file found at the project root. Compile the nob build tool in the same way you did the config tool in the previous step, invoking your compiler without additional arguments.

$ cc -o nob nob.c

Run the build tool

Then run the resulting executable file. Build artifacts will be placed in the out directory, and the final project executables will be copied into this build configuration folder for easier access.

$ ./nob

Clean up build directories

Both the config and nob tools support the clean command. Running nob clean in its build directory will remove all of the build artifacts. Running config clean at the project root will remove all build directories, and any build artifacts in the project root directory if you specified an in-source build during configuration.

# in a build configuration directory
$ ./nob clean
# or, at the project root
$ ./config clean