Command Line Tools

Here we assume that you have either installed the command-line tools, cloned the repository, or set up the developer's Eclipse. In the following, we assume that $LF is the root directory of your Lingua Franca installation (for me, having set up the developer's Eclipse, this is /Users/eal/lingua-franca-master/git/lingua-franca). In this directory is a subdirectory $LF/bin. This contains the following files:

• lfc: A command-line compiler.
• build-lfc: Script to build the compiler (lfc uses this to build itself if necessary).
• run-lf-tests: A command to run all the Lingua Franca tests (see Regression Tests).

It is recommended to add $LF/bin to the PATH environment variable. On the rest of this page, we assume that $LF/bin is on the PATH.

lfc

You can invoke the compiler on a Lingua Franca file as follows:

    lfc filename.lf

This will generate subdirectories src-gen and bin containing the generated and compiled code, respectively. You can give a -r or --rebuild option to lfc, in which case it will rebuild the compiler (using the offline mode) before invoking it.

    Usage: lfc [options] file... [target-options]
    Options:
      -c | --target-compiler  Target compiler to invoke.
      -h | --help             Display this information.
      -n | --no-compile       Do not invoke target compiler.
      -r | --rebuild          Rebuild the compiler first.

To use the compiler, first create a directory in which you would like to work and create a file in that directory called HelloWorld.lf containing the following:

  target C;
  main reactor HelloWorld {
      timer t;
      reaction(t) {=
          printf("Hello World.\n");
      =}
  }

Then, in that directory, invoke the compiler:

    lfc HelloWorld.lf

This will create two directories inside your working directory, src-gen and bin. The first contains the generated C code and the second contains the resulting executable program. Run the program:

    bin/HelloWorld

This should produce output that looks something like this:

Start execution at time Sun Oct  6 08:42:49 2019
plus 314266000 nanoseconds.
Hello World.
Elapsed logical time (in nsec): 0
Elapsed physical time (in nsec): 1106000

build-lfc

Running build-lfc will build the Lingua Franca compiler using Gradle. The command-line options are:

    -c | --clean:          Build entirely from scratch.
    -h | --help:           Display this information.
    -o | --offline:        Use cached libraries.
    -s | --stacktrace:     Provide stacktrace of build errors.

The first time you run this, you will need a network connection because a certain amount of infrastructure gets downloaded. After that, you can specify the --offline option to build using local files only.

run-lf-tests

See Regression Tests.