abs2haskell tool

Requirements for building the compiler

The compiler itself is written in haskell and distributed as a normal Haskell package.

Therefore to build abs2haskell you need either

1. a recent release of the Haskell platform (version >= 2013.2.0.0),

2. the GHC compiler accompanied by the Cabal packaging system:

   • GHC compiler (version >=7.6)
   • Cabal package (version >=1.4)
   • cabal-install program. The compiler depends on other community packages/libraries. This program will automatically fetch and install any library dependencies.

Building and installing the compiler

If you have the above installed then simply run inside the abs2haskell/ directory:

sudo make install

Running the compiler to generate Haskell code

After install the compiler, you should have the program abs2haskell under your PATH.

Examples of running:

abs2haskell examples/BenchMaps.abs 

# An ABS program may have multiple main blocks in different modules. 
# So you have to specify in which module is the main block you want to build with

abs2haskell --main-is=examples/BenchMaps.abs examples/BenchMaps.abs 

abs2haskell examples/   # will compile all ABS files under examples directory

The compiler will generate ".hs" files for each compiled ABS module. No other runtime system libraries and dependencies will be generated.

Compiling the generated Haskell code to machine code (so you can run it)

ghc --make -threaded examples/BenchMaps.hs # put the generated haskell file that has the main block here

Running the final program

./examples/BenchMaps -O # means run it on 1 core with default optimizations
./examples/BenchMaps -O +RTS -N1 # the same as the above
./examples/BenchMaps -O +RTS -N2 # run it on 2 cores
./examples/BenchMaps -O +RTS -N4 # run it on 4 cores
./examples/BenchMaps -O +RTS -NK # run it on K cores

(Optional) Building the Grammar

You will need

• The bnf converter
• The alex Haskell lexer (do cabal install alex)
• The happy Haskell parser (do cabal install happy)

The grammar lies under src/ABS.cf. After your modifications, run:

make grammar

to generate the Haskell source files. Then you do make, so the abs2haskell compiler can pickup any changes of the grammar.