Contirubtion guide

Build

In the same way to other Haskell softwares, Nirum compiler can be built using Haskell Stack. If you didn’t install it yet see also its installation guide.

If it’s your first build of Nirum compiler you need to setup a proper version of GHC:

stack setup

The following command builds an executable binary of Nirum compiler:

stack build

A built executable binary aren’t installed to PATH until stack install command is run. Without installation a built executable binary can be invoked using stack exec command:

stack exec -- nirum -t python -o out/ examples/

Note that -- indicates options after it belong to the nirum executable, not stack exec command.

Testing scopes

Since it is a compiler which generate source codes, there are two scopes we should test:

  1. the compiler itself, and
  2. codes that the compiler generates.

The former is unit testing and the latter one is integration testing. We have two commands/scripts to run corresponding testing:

  1. stack test :spec
  2. stack test :targets

If you’ve changed things related to a target backend you should test everything:

stack test

If you’ve changed pure internals of the compiler probably it’s okay to run only the former command. Anyway both testings are run by CI so that changes breaking either testing cannot be merged.

External dependencies

Each target test suite has its external dependencies (i.e., non-library program dependencies):

Lint

Since we want to keep our coding style consistently, we run lint to check it. You can get more information about hlint on its homepage.

We recommend you to register lint to Git hooks.

ln -s "$PWD/lint.sh" "$PWD/.git/hooks/pre-commit"

If you have registered a hook once, it will be automatically executed when you make a commit.

Changelog

We believe logging changes is a part of making software. So we have the policy enforcing every pull request to have an entry to changelog (i.e., a diff on CHANGES.md file) on the CI.

Please put [chagelog skip] on commit message if your change is not related to the Nirum compiler (e.g., fixing a typo).