Playing with Flix on Windows

This repository gathers Flix code examples coming from various websites. It also includes several build scripts (Ant files, Bash scripts, batch files, Gradle scripts, Make scripts) for experimenting with Flix on a Windows machine.

Ada, Akka, C++, COBOL, Dafny, Dart, Deno, Docker, Erlang, Golang, GraalVM, Haskell, Kafka, Kotlin, LLVM, Modula-2, Node.js, Rust, Scala 3, Spark, Spring, TruffleSqueak, WiX Toolset and Zig are other topics we are continuously monitoring.

☛ Read the document "Did You Know?" from the Flix documentation to know more about the Flix ecosystem.

Project dependencies

This project depends on the following external software for the Microsoft Windows platform:

• Apache Maven 3.9 (requires Java 8+) (release notes)
• Flix 0.54 (requires Java 21+) (release notes)
• Git 2.47 (release notes)
• Gradle 8.11 (requires Java 8+) (release notes)
• Temurin OpenJDK 21 LTS (release notes, Shipilev's notes, Java 21 API)

Optionally one may also install the following software:

• Apache Ant 1.10 (requires Java 8) (release notes)
• ConEmu 2023 (release notes)
• Flix nightly builds ¹
• mdBook 0.4 ² (changelog)
• MSYS2 2024 (change log)
• Scala 2.13 (release notes)
• Temurin JDK Mission Control 9.0 ³ (release notes)
• Visual Studio Code 1.95 (release notes)

☛ Installation policy
When possible we install software from a Zip archive rather than via a Windows installer. In our case we defined C:\opt\ as the installation directory for optional software tools (in reference to the /opt/ directory on Unix).

For instance our development environment looks as follows (December 2024) ⁴:

C:\opt\apache-ant\              ( 43 MB)
C:\opt\apache-maven\            ( 10 MB)
C:\opt\ConEmu\                  ( 26 MB)
C:\opt\flix\                    ( 37 MB)
C:\opt\Git\                     (393 MB)
C:\opt\gradle\                  (144 MB)
C:\opt\jdk-temurin-21.0.5_11\   (326 MB)
C:\opt\jmc\                     ( 99 MB)
C:\opt\mdBook\                  ( 10 MB)
C:\opt\msys64\                  (5.5 GB)
C:\opt\scala-2.13.15\           ( 25 MB)
C:\opt\VSCode\                  (381 MB)

Directory structure ▴

This project has the following directory structure :

bin\
docs\
examples\{README.md, areas, arrays, channels, ..}
flix\     (Git submodule)
lutz-examples\{README.md, channels, datalog, etc.}
CONTRIBUTIONS.md
BUILD.md
DEPS.md
QUICKREF.md
README.md
RESOURCES.md
setenv.bat
UBUNTU_WSL.md

where

• directory bin\ provides several utility batch files.
• directory docs\ contains Flix related papers/articles.
• directory examples\ contains Flix code examples (see README.md).
• directory flix\ contains our fork of the flix/flix repository as a Github submodule.
• directory lutz-examples\ contains Flix code examples from Lutz Hühnken's article (see README.md).
• file CONTRIBUTIONS.md presents ongoing works and contributions to the Flix project.
• file BUILD.md presents the Flix build.
• file DEPS.md lists library dependencies of published Flix distributions.
• file QUICKREF.md gathers Flix language features.
• file README.md is the Markdown document for this page.
• file RESOURCES.md gathers Flix related documents.
• file setenv.bat is the batch script for setting up our environment.
• file UBUNTU_WSL.md presents a Flix code examples in Ubuntu WSL.

Bash/Batch commands ▴

We distinguish different sets of batch commands:

1. setenv.bat – This batch command makes external tools such as git.exe and gradle.bat directly available from the Windows command prompt (see section Project dependencies).

   > setenv help
   Usage: setenv { <option> | <subcommand> }
    
     Options:
       -debug      print commands executed by this script
       -verbose    print progress messages
    
     Subcommands:
       help        print this help message
   

2. examples\*\build.bat – Code examples can be built/run/tested using the build.bat command.
   

    > build
    Usage: build { <option> | <subcommand> }
     
    Options:
      -debug      print commands executed by this script
      -nightly    use latest Flix nightly build if locally available
      -verbose    print progress messages
     
    Subcommands:
      clean       delete generated files
      compile     generate program executable
      help        print this help message
      run         execute the generated program "areas"
      test        run the unit tests
    

3. examples\*\build.gradle – Code examples can be built/run/tested using the gradle.bat build tool.

4. examples\*\build.sh – Code examples can be built/run/tested using the bash.exe scripting tool.

   > sh build.sh help
   Usage: build.sh { <option> | <subcommand> }
    
   Options:
     -debug       print commands executed by this script
     -nightly     select latest Flix nightly build if locally available
     -verbose     print progress messages
    
   Subcommands:
     clean        delete generated files
     compile      compile Flix source files
     decompile    decompile generated code with CFR
     help         print this help message
     run          execute Flix program "areas"
     test         run the unit tests
   

Usage examples ▴

setenv.bat

We execute command setenv.bat once to setup our development environment; it makes external tools such as git.exe, gradle.bat, make.exe and sh.exe directly available from the command prompt:

> setenv
Tool versions:
   java 21.0.5, javac 21.0.5, scalac 2.13.15, flix 0.54.0,
   gradle 8.11, make 3.81, mdbook v0.4.43, mvn 3.9.9,
   git 2.47.1, diff 3.10, bash 5.2.37(1)

> where git gradle make sh
C:\opt\Git\bin\git.exe
C:\opt\Git\mingw64\bin\git.exe
C:\opt\gradle\bin\gradle
C:\opt\gradle\bin\gradle.bat
C:\opt\make-3.81\bin\make.exe
C:\opt\Git\bin\sh.exe
C:\opt\Git\usr\bin\sh.exe

Command setenv.bat with option -verbose displays additional information:

• the download of the Flix nightly build to directory %FLIX_HOME% (if not yet done),
• the tool paths (which may not contain the version suffix, i.e. C:\opt\Git\bin\git.exe in some installations),
• the environment variables defined locally within this session,
• and the path associations (i.e. F:\ in this case, but other drive names may be displayed as path associations are globally defined).

> setenv -verbose
Assign path C:\Users\michelou\workspace-perso\flix-examples to drive F:
Download file "flix-2024-11-30.jar" to directory "C:\opt\flix"

Tool versions:
   java 21.0.5, javac 21.0.5, scalac 2.13.15, flix 0.54.0,
   gradle 8.11, make 3.81, mdbook v0.4.43, mvn 3.9.9,
   git 2.47.1, diff 3.10, bash 5.2.37(1)
Tool paths:
   C:\opt\jdk-temurin-21.0.5_11\bin\java.exe
   C:\opt\jdk-temurin-21.0.5_11\bin\javac.exe
   C:\opt\scala-2.13.15\bin\scalac.bat
   C:\opt\gradle\bin\gradle.bat
   C:\opt\make-3.81\bin\make.exe
   C:\opt\mdBook\mdbook.exe
   C:\opt\apache-maven\bin\mvn.cmd
   C:\opt\Git\bin\git.exe
   C:\opt\Git\usr\bin\diff.exe
Environment variables:
   "ANT_HOME=C:\opt\apache-ant"
   "FLIX_HOME=C:\opt\flix"
   "GIT_HOME=C:\opt\Git"
   "GRADLE_HOME=C:\opt\gradle"
   "JAVA_HOME=C:\opt\jdk-temurin-21.0.5_11"
   "MAKE_HOME=C:\opt\make-3.81"
   "MAVEN_HOME=C:\opt\apache-maven"
   "MDBOOK_HOME=C:\opt\mdBook"
   "SCALA_HOME=C:\opt\scala-2.13.15"
Path associations:
   F:\: => %USERPROFILE%\workspace-perso\flix-examples

Footnotes ▴

[1] Flix nightly builds ↩

Our installation directory %FLIX_HOME% looks as follows on November 30, 2024 :

> tree /a /f c:\opt\flix | tail -n +3
C:\opt\flix
    flix-2024-11-30.jar
    flix.jar

Command build.bat in our Flix projects features the -nightly option to choose the latest Flix nightly build archive file locally available instead of the release version (archive file flix.jar above).

[2] mdBook ↩

We use mdbook.exe to work on our local copy of the online book "Programming Flix" generated from the GitHub project flix/book.

[3] JDK Mission Control ↩

Each vendor provides his own distribution of the JDK Mission Control tool, e.g. Adoptium JDK Mission Control (our choice), Zulu Mission Control, Liberica Mission Control or Oracle JDK Mission Control.

We use jmc.exe to investigate issues occuring during the build of our GitHub fork of the flix/flix repository.

> %JMC_HOME%\bin\jmc.exe -vm %JAVA_HOME%\bin

[4] Downloads ↩

In our case we downloaded the following installation files (see section 1):

apache-ant-1.10.15-bin.zip                         (  9 MB)
apache-maven-3.9.9-bin.zip                         ( 10 MB)
ConEmuPack.230724.7z                               (  5 MB)
flix.jar                                           ( 39 MB)
flix-2024-11-30.jar                                ( 39 MB)
gradle-8.11.bin.zip                                (103 MB)
mdbook-v0.4.43-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.zip          (  4 MB)
msys2-x86_64-20240727.exe                          ( 94 MB)
org.openjdk.jmc-9.0.0-win32.win32.x86_64.zip       ( 90 MB)
OpenJDK21U-jdk_x64_windows_hotspot_21.0.5_11.zip   (191 MB)
PortableGit-2.47.1-64-bit.7z.exe                   ( 46 MB)
scala-2.13.15.zip                                  ( 22 MB)
VSCode-win32-x64-1.95.2.zip                        (131 MB)

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mics/December 2024 ▲