Tutorials - Building and installing

You can choose to build the project from source (which requires some knowledge like git, cmake and using shell commands) or get a build from a ZIP file.

Setup

You can setup an environment variable named ARKSCRIPT_PATH, with the path to the installation directory of ArkScript, so that the standard library can be located without using --lib <path>. This step is optional. The environment variable should direct to a folder with the folder lib/ inside. Multiple path can be provided if your installation separates the modules and the standard library, by separating the different paths with a single ;.

Installing from a release

Windows

Download the windows-msvc-{version}.zip from the releases, and unpack it wherever you want, as long as you remember where (or add the location to an environment variable as specified in the setup section, to avoid using --lib <path>). To use the command ark from everywhere, you will need to add it to your PATH environment variable.

A (maybe easier) alternative is to download windows-installer.exe, an InnoSetup installer for ArkScript. It will install it as well as the standard library (modules included) in your C:/Program Files folder, and create the appropriate ARKSCRIPT_PATH environment variable.

Linux

Download the linux-{compiler}-{version}.zip from the releases. You can put the binaries and the lib anywhere you want, as long as you add it to your path to execute ArkScript without giving the complete path (in your .bashrc for example). You can also create an environment variable as stated in the setup above.

Installing through Docker

Just launch docker pull arkscript/stable:latest and you're good to go! To run it, use docker run -it arkscript/stable:latest ... arkscript executable options here.

Installing from source

Clone the repository and go in the newly created repository, then init and update all the git submodules, as follows:

> git clone https://github.com/ArkScript-lang/Ark.git
> cd Ark
> git submodule update --init --recursive

If you want a specific revision or tag, you can do this right before initializing and updating the git submodules:

# for a specific revision
> git checkout <commit>
# for a specific tag
> git checkout tags/<tag>

Different CMake switches are available to customize the build:

-DARK_BUILD_EXE to generate an executable, defaults to Off, building a shared library
-DARK_ENABLE_SYSTEM to enable `sys:exec` (execute shell commands without restrictions), defaults to On
-DARK_PROFILER_MIPS to enable the MIPS counting, defaults to Off
-DARK_BUILD_MODULES to build the modules, defaults to Off
-DARK_NO_STDLIB to avoid the installation of the ArkScript standard library
-DARK_SANITIZERS to enable ASAN and UBSAN

Windows

Requirements:

Windows 10 x64
Visual Studio 17 2022
cmake >= 3.11

Commands:

PS> cmake . -Bbuild -DARK_BUILD_EXE=On -G "Visual Studio 17 Win64"
PS> cmake --build build --config Release
PS> cmake --install build --config Release  # might need administrator rights

Linux

Requirements:

g++ 14
64 bits computer
cmake >= 3.11

Commands:

~/ark$ cmake . -Bbuild -DARK_BUILD_EXE=On
~/ark$ cmake --build build --config Release
~/ark$ sudo cmake --install build --config Release  # needs administrator rights to install under /usr/bin

MacOS

Requirements:

g++ 14 or clang 16
cmake >= 3.11

On MacOS versions prior to 10.15, libc++ lacks filesystem in the standard library.

You will need to :

Install a newer compiler using Homebrew: brew install gcc && brew link gcc
Pass compiler path to cmake in the build step: -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=/usr/local/bin/g++-14

Commands:

~/ark$ cmake . -Bbuild -DARK_BUILD_EXE=On -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=/usr/local/bin/g++-14
~/ark$ cmake --build build --config Release
~/ark$ cmake --install build --config Release  # might need administrator rights

Running the tests

To check that everything works, it is important to run the tests for the projects, and we have a multitude of them:

tests/arkscript: tests written in ArkScript itself, testing the builtins, operators and keywords (language unit tests)
tests/benchmarks: benchmarks for the parser and VM with a few scripts to help identifying regressions
tests/errors: every subfolder is a category of errors we are trying to detect, with a.ark and a.expected making a pair of a snippet that should produce an error and the expected error
tests/fuzzing: a collection of scripts (in tests/fuzzing/docker/) and ArkScript source files under the different corpus / corpus-cmin / corpus-cmin-tmin directories (only the corpus directory is managed by us, the two others are generated automatically through scripts and AFL++). Fuzzers can be run automatically using the start-afl-docker.sh script, that starts a docker image, compile ArkScript and run the fuzzers inside tmux sessions. An output/ folder is created at the root of the project with the fuzzers output
tests/unittests: C++ unit tests for the project using boost/ut, testing different utilities of the project