Langkit

Dependencies

To use Langkit:

• Quex version 0.64.8 - http://sourceforge.net/projects/quex/files/HISTORY/0.64 Follow the installation guide in the quex README
• The mako template system for Python (see REQUIREMENTS.dev)
• Clang-format

Install

There is no proper distribution for the langkit Python package, so just add the top-level langkit directory to your PYTHONPATH in order to use it. Note that this directory is self-contained, so you can copy it somewhere else.

Testing

There is currently no testsuite dedicated to Langkit. Yeah, it's bad! But we plan to add one at some point.

Documentation

The developer and user's documentation for Langkit is in langkit/doc. You can consult it as a text files or you can build it. For instance, to generate HTML documents, run from the top directory:

$ make -C langkit/doc html

And then open the following file in your favorite browser:

langkit/doc/_build/html/index.html

Bootstrapping a new language engine

Nothing is more simple than getting an initial project skeleton to work on a new language engine. Imagine you want to create an engine for the Foo language, run from the top-level directory:

$ python langkit/create-project.py Foo

And then have a look at the created foo directory: you have minimal lexers and parsers and a manage.py script you can use to build this new engine:

$ python foo/manage.py make

Here you are!

Developer tools

Langkit uses mako templates generating Ada, C and Python code. This can be hard to read. To ease development, Vim syntax files are available under the utils directory (see makoada.vim, makocpp.vim). Install them in your $HOME/.vim/syntax directory to get automatic highlighting of the template files.