Installing Kitten

In the future, there will be prepackaged binary releases of the Kitten compiler. Until then, you must build it yourself. Kitten’s compiler is written in Haskell, and its build uses the Stack build tool.

You will need:

• Git
• Stack

Clone the Git repository:

git clone [email protected]:evincarofautumn/kitten.git
cd kitten

Set up Stack if you haven’t already done so:

stack setup

Build the compiler, and run its test suite if you like:

stack build
stack test

Now Kitten can be executed with stack exec kitten.

If you want to install Kitten in a standard location outside the build directory, due to a deficiency in Stack’s support for Cabal’s data-files feature, it is not recommended to use stack install to install a copy of the executable, because this will not install the common vocabulary common.ktn containing Kitten’s standard library.

There are two workarounds. One is to forgo Stack, and build and install Kitten using Cabal directly:

cabal sandbox init
cabal install --only-dependencies
cabal install --prefix="$HOME/.local"

This will correctly install the common vocab so that Kitten can find it. The preferred install location for Kitten is ~/.local on Unix-like systems (so the executable resides at ~/.local/bin/kitten) or %APPDATA%\local on Windows (resp. %APPDATA%\local\bin\kitten.exe).

The other option is to manually copy common.ktn to the install directory:

stack install
cp common.ktn ~/.local/bin/

It’s also recommended to add the install directory (~/.local/bin or %APPDATA\local\bin) to your PATH so that you can invoke kitten directly without a path prefix.

These are the only files installed by Kitten, so to uninstall it, you only need to delete the compiler and common vocab from the install directory.