Installation

From source

You can build and install Laye tools from source.

If you haven't already, grab yourself a copy of the source code, either manually or through git.

$ git clone git@github.com:laye-lang/laye.git
$ cd laye

Laye uses a build script written in C using (a modified version of) the nob.h build tool from Alexey Kutepov. To bootstrap the build tool, simply compile it with your favorite C compiler.

$ clang -o nob nob.c

You can then run the nob executable to run the default build process. To install the Laye compiler and its standard library, run the following:

$ ./nob install

By default, ./nob install will attempt to install Laye to your default system install directories. On Windows, this is C:\Program Files\Laye and on Linux this is /usr/bin and usr/lib/laye. You can pass the --print-dirs option to print the installation directories and exit before installation occurs to verify the install paths are to your liking.

To change where Laye is installed, specify an install prefix manually.

$ ./nob install --prefix ~/.laye

This will place the laye compiler executable in ~/.laye/bin and the standard library source files in ~/.laye/lib/laye. To control each install location separately, pass both the --bin-prefix and --lib-prefix options instead.

$ ./nob install --bin-prefix ~ --lib-prefix /usr/share

To clear any ambiguity in how the final install paths are constructed:

• The bin directory name is appended to value of the --bin-prefix.
• The compiler executable name is laye, so the final location for it is $BIN_PREFIX/bin/laye.
• The lib directory name is appended to value of the --lib-prefix.
• The standard library files are contained within another subdirectory named laye. The final location for it is then $LIB_PREFIX/lib/laye/<library-files>.
• The --prefix argument performs the exact same logic for both directories at the same time.

The compiler currently does not implicitly include the standard library. While there is a simple plan to make this possible, for the time being you must explicitly pass -I $LIB_PREFIX/lib/laye/<lib-name> to all compiler invorations. The name of the standard library directory is liblaye.