README-cpp.md

pscpp

Performance

• No runtime system beyond some support classes and the standard C++11 (or later) runtime library
• For automatic memory management, uses native C++11 reference counting (std::shared_ptr)
• Uses PureScript's normal tail call optimization techniques for generated C++ code

Differences from PureScript:

• Foreign imports/exports are C++ instead of JavaScript – see FFI notes and standard library foreign implementations
• No C++-specific REPL

Other notes:

• PureScript arrays are implemented using std::vector
• String types are implemented with C++11 u8 literals (UTF-8) and std::string
• Number is C++ double, Int is C++ int, Char is std::string (single UTF-8 entity), Boolean is bool

Future ideas:

• Nice facilities (modules) for concurrency/parallelism, using std::thread, std::async, etc. under the hood (output is already generally thread-safe for immutable values, thanks to std::shared_ptr)

Getting Started

This assumes you are running macOS (OS X) or a Unix-like system (Linux, *BSD, etc.).

1. Make sure you have developer tools for your system installed. For macOS, you'll need a recent version of Xcode. For Linux, etc., you can use clang 3.5 or later, or gcc/g++ 4.9.2 or later.

2. Create a working directory wherever you like, and a src subdirectory under it, which will be where you will place your own PureScript source files.

3. Under your working directory, also create an ffi subdirectory, which will be where you will place C/C++ FFI source files. You should at least add the contents of purescript-native-cpp-ffi into this directory, in addition to any of your own foreign implementations.

4. Generate the default GNU Makefile in your working directory by running pscpp --makefile.

5. Use PureScript's standard psc-package utility to add and manage package dependencies.

6. You should now be ready to build a PureScript program:

• As stated above, place your source file(s) in the working directory's src subdirectory and execute make debug or make release. If your build machine has multiple cores, you might want to append -jN to your make command, where N is the number of cores.

• This will generate the C++ source tree for your program and then build an executable binary. The resulting executable will be in the bin subdirectory under the output directory and called main (so output/bin/main, by default). Source files will be under src (output/src/ by default).

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