Building an Ampersand Compiler with Stack
To build your own Ampersand compiler is something to avoid as a user. As a developer, however, you may have reasons to do this yourself. For instance to verify what happens in older versions.
The Ampersand compiler is a Haskell program built with stack. Stack is a build tool for Haskell projects such as Ampersand. We have automated the building process (using stack) for the following purposes:
to prevent mistakes such as dependency conflicts inside and between Haskell packages, for an uninterrupted compilation process (robust building);
to generate ampersand compilers for different platforms (platform independence);
to provide a reproducible and reliable build process to developers with diverse development tools, operating systems, and working environments (uniform building);
to allow for generating images for docker containers (containerization);
to accellerate the build process to increase the release frequency of Ampersand.
Installation
Haskell comes as part of Stack, so there is no need to install Haskell separately.
The instructions to install Stack are pretty clear for the various platforms. Make sure you read the part about the STACK_ROOT environment variable.
To compile Ampersand you need a file package.yaml, which sits in the Ampersand repository. Fetch it and put it in you working directory. From the command-line, call command stack install and after a while (go get coffee!) your ampersand compiler exists! NB: If you want to build Rieks' preprocessor as well, the magic spell is stack install --flag ampersand:buildAll
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