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
comes as part of , so there is no need to install Haskell separately.
The 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 , 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