Carp

Installation

Latest release

See https://github.com/carp-lang/Carp/releases.

Building the Carp executable from source

1. Make sure you have a recent version of Stack installed.
2. Clone this repo to your machine.
3. Run stack build in the root of the project directory.
4. stack install will install the Carp command line tool for easy access on your system.
5. Make sure that the directory where stack installs executables is on your PATH, i.e: export PATH=~/.local/bin:$PATH.

Setting the CARP_DIR

To be able to run carp from anywhere on you system, the executable must know where to find its core libraries and other files. Set the environment variable CARP_DIR so that it points to the root of the Carp repo.

For example, add this to your .bashrc or similar:

export CARP_DIR=~/Carp/

You should now be able to start Carp from anywhere:

$ carp

Ensuring an UTF-8 aware LC_CTYPE locale in POSIX environments

To be able to handle UTF-8 correctly when using carp’s interactive repl (binaries from carp always handle UTF-8 correctly), all POSIX aware environments (Linux, MacOs or even Emacs’s eshell inside a Windows 10) need to have an LC_CTYPE environment variable set and exported to an UTF-8 aware value.

For example, add this to your .bashrc or similar:

export LC_CTYPE=C.UTF-8

Take into account that the the environment variable LC_ALL, when set, overrides the value of LC_CTYPE. So you may want to unset LC_ALL or to set and export it to an UTF-8 aware value. You can see the values of LC_ALL and LC_CTYPE with the command locale.

C compiler

The carp executable will emit a single file with C code, main.c and try to compile it using an external C compiler. On macOS and Linux it defaults to clang, so make sure you have that installed (On macOS this is preferably done by installing XCode, including its developer tools).

On Windows the default C compiler used by Carp is clang-cl.exe which compiles the code using Clang but links it with the Visual Studio linker. Tip: use the package manager Scoop to install LLVM for an easy way to set this up on Windows. Also make sure you have Visual Studio with the C/C++ addon installed. Please note that you don’t need WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) to use Carp.

If you want to use another compiler, you can configure the exact build command like so:

(Project.config "compiler" "gcc --important-flag")

SDL, GLFW, etc

The examples involving graphics/sound/interaction will require the following libraries installed on your system:

• SDL 2 (cross platform game/interactivity library)
• SDL_image 2 (image helpers)
• SDL_ttf 2 (font rendering)
• SDL_mixer 2 (audio playback)
• glfw (Create a rendering context for OpenGL or Vulcan)

On macOS and Linux we use pkg-config to handle include paths and linking flags, so make sure you have that properly installed and configured to find the external libraries.

Please let us know if you have trouble getting these bindings to work! We have tried making everything as reliable as possible but there are often corner cases when it comes to dependency management. And remember that you’re always welcome to start an issue or ask questions in the gitter channel.

Footnote for Windows

You can install clang with mingw64 but you’ll also want to run vcvarsall.bat amd64 or vcvarsall.bat x86 each time you start your shell to help clang find the right headers. See https://github.com/carp-lang/Carp/issues/700 or https://github.com/carp-lang/Carp/issues/1323 for more information.

Also when compiling files with carp from Windows you must ensure that :

• the file is encoded either as ANSI or UTF-8. (Using another encoding like UTF-8-BOM doesn’t work.)
• using either Unix (LF) or Windows (CR LF) as linefeed/newline. (Using Macintosh (CR) as newline doesn’t work.)

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