Crow

This readme describes how to build Crow from source.

For information about the language itself, visit the website.

Setup

To work on Crow, you'll need these tools:

• git: Used to get this repository.
• hg: Used to clone the dyncall library.
• ldc: Used to compile bin/crow.
  • Don't use the Visual D installer as it uses an older compiler. Download the latest release instead.
• node: Used to test JS builds and to build the VSCode extension.
• Also install dependencies listed on the download page.
• On Linux: Optionally, GraphViz to support make show-dependencies.
• On Windows, use the "x64 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS 20__" (fill in the year) when running build commands.

Then run:

git clone https://github.com/andy-hanson/crow.git
cd crow
make test

This will build bin/crow (or bin\crow.exe on Windows), test, then serve the website on localhost.

You can also speed up builds by passing -j4 (e.g. make all -j4), but it makes the output harder to read.

Testing

make test runs all tests.

There are 2 kinds of tests:

• Unit tests in src/test. make unit-test runs these.
• End-to-end tests in the test directory. make end-to-end-test runs these.
  • If adding or changing tests, run make end-to-end-test-overwrite.

Before any pull request, you should also run make all. This tests, lints, and starts serving the website. Run the demo on the site to manually verify that WASM is still working.

Debugging

Debugging crow itself (compiler or interpreter)

Use make debug.

Debugging Crow code

Currently, Crow has no debugger of its own, so you'll have to compile to C and debug that. By default, crow compiles the C code with debug symbols.

For example:

crow build a.crow
gdb a
rbreak throw
run

Building with libgccjit

Run make all JIT=1 to build with libgccjit support. Use crow run demo/hello.crow --jit to test it out.

Publishing

Run make upload-site to build and publish. This requires you to have aws installed. You need to do this on both Linux and Windows. (Windows uploads crow-windows-x64.tar.xz and crow-demo-windows.tar.xz, Linux handles everything else.)