Installation and Configuration Guide

Prerequisite Packages

Beluga requires the following packages, regardless of operating system. We recommend installing lrwrap to improve performance in Interactive mode.

MAC OS

All of the prerequisite packages are available through OPAM (OCaml package manager) for OCaml. Please visit their website for the details.

Linux

Under Debian Linux, all the necessary prerequisites can be installed with just the following command:

# apt-get install ocaml ocaml-findlib libextlib-ocaml-dev ocaml-ulex

The interactive mode is greatly improved if you have rlwrap installed, so you might also want to consider:

# apt-get install rlwrap

These commands may work under other distributions. The packages are also available through OPAM for OCaml

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

Beluga can be executed on Windows through Cygwin. The necessary prerequisites can be installed using the OCaml package manager called OPAM.

  1. Follow the instructions to install OCaml under Windows downloading and running the graphical installer from the OCaml installation page.
  2. From the start menu (or using the desktop icon) select Cygwin and launch it.
  3. Install the prerequisite packages using the command "opam install package_name".

Get Beluga

Clone Beluga from the GitHub repository https://github.com/Beluga-lang/Beluga.git by running

 git clone https://github.com/Beluga-lang/Beluga.git

Building

Compile by running make from the Beluga directory:

~/beluga# make

Compilation Options

Setting the following environment variables for make enables the following compilation option:

BYTE:
sets byte-code compilation instead of native
DEBUG:
enables the -g option of ocamlc
PROFILE:
enables the -p option of ocamlc
WARN_PATTERN:
enables warning for non-exhaustive patterns
VERBOSE:
sets verbosity level of ocamlbuild
PARALLEL:
sets max number of parallel processes

For instance, to enable byte-code compilation, run:

~/beluga# make BYTE=true

Troubleshooting

Attempting to build Beluga before installing the prequisites may cause libraries to be only partially updated. You may receive a new error message once you've set up the prereq packages.

Error: The files [path/to/file]
        and [path/to/file]
        make inconsistent assumptions over interface [library name]

Try cleaning the Beluga directory.

~/beluga# make clean all

Executing Programs

Once you've built the Beluga executables, you can now run Beluga programs with the ./beluga/bin/beluga" executable.

~/beluga# bin/beluga path/to/program.bel

Emacs Mode

Beluga includes a major mode for programming in Emacs. The elisp file saved as ./beluga/tools/beluga-mode.el directory.

  1. Update your ~/.emacs configuration file with the lines written below. XEmacs users must update ~/.xemacs and ~/.xema.cs/init.el with the same text. Create any of these files if they do not exist already.
    (add-to-list 'load-path "path/to/beluga/tools/")
    (load "beluga-mode.el")

  2. Add beluga/bin to your path; if Emacs does not detect your custom path, a quick fix is to create a symbolic link to the Beluga executable in a directory that is in the default Emacs path (such as /usr/bin).
  3. Restart Emacs.

Emacs will now launch Beluga-mode automatically when you open a program with the .bel suffix.

Bug reports

For any bugs or issues, please, use the GitHub issue tracker.