Since we don’t have static builds yet, you’ll need to build Plasma from source. For that you’ll need Mercury, since our compiler is written in it.
Compiling Mercury from source can take a long time, but if you’re on Debian, Ubuntu or other derivative running on x86_64 then there are some packages! Read on or follow the instructions at https://dl.mercurylang.org/deb/
For Ubuntu 18.04, this is what you need to do:
You’ll need a basic C and C++ build environment. That can be installed with the build-essential:
sudo apt install build-essential
Next install the repo where you can find the packages, They’re signed with Paul’s gpg key, so you’ll need to tell apt to trust things signed by it:
cd /tmp wget https://paul.bone.id.au/paul.asc sudo apt-key add paul.asc
Create a new file in /etc/apt/sources.list.d, name it mercury.list and paste in it:
deb http://dl.mercurylang.org/deb/ stretch main deb-src http://dl.mercurylang.org/deb/ stretch main
sudo apt update sudo apt install mercury-rotd-recommended
If all goes well you now have a working version of Mercury on your computer.
Now it’s time to clone the plasma repo:
git clone https://github.com/PlasmaLang/plasma.git
Now you can configure the Makefile if you want to. In the Makefile itself is documentation that explains what options make what build. The default build is probably fine, so you shouldn’t have to configure anything really.
To optionally build the documentation, you want to install AsciiDoc:
sudo apt install asciidoc
Beware, this is a very large installation, on a default Ubuntu installation this amounts to over 1 GB of space and a download of over 300MB. If AsciiDoc is not installed, documentation will not be built.
Then run make and it will build you the plasma compiler (src/plzc) and the runtime (runtime/plzrun)
Docker
If you want to run Plasma in a Docker container, this Dockerfile could help:
FROM alpine
WORKDIR /src RUN wget http://dl.mercurylang.org/rotd/mercury-srcdist-rotd-2018-11-12.tar.gz RUN tar zxf mercury-srcdist-rotd-2018-11-12.tar.gz WORKDIR /src/mercury-srcdist-rotd-2018-11-12 RUN apk add binutils build-base bison flex git asciidoc linux-headers RUN ./configure --enable-minimal-install RUN make RUN make install WORKDIR /src RUN git clone https://github.com/PlasmaLang/plasma.git WORKDIR /src/plasma RUN make RUN make test
The rotd version of Mercury could probably be more recent, depending on when you are reading this. Note that this is just for running Plasma programs, not for hacking on Plasma itself. The minimal install of mercury doesn’t allow for debugging the Plasma compiler.