Unbox

Introduction

Unbox is a GPLv3 licensed version of the J programming language interpreter derived from the initial J Software source release. The goals of this project are to provide bug fixes in the short term and language enhancements and new features in the long term. Although this is intended to be used as a drop in replacement for the J shared library the behavior of the interpreter and the definition of the language itself will likely diverge from the official J Software version over time.

Building

Prerequisites

1. Unbox uses the tup build system. Install tup for your platform.
2. Clone the repository
3. Edit tup.config
   • CONFIG_RELEASE: toggle the optimizations / debugging information
   • CONFIG_TEST: toggle whether or not to run the test script suite after a successful build
   • CONFIG_CLANG: y to use clang instead of gcc on Linux
   • CONFIG_X86_64: toggle 64/32 bit build
   • CONFIG_READLINE: toggle readline support for jconsole on Linux

Linux

The build scripts assume you are using a 64 bit compiler even if targeting a 32 bit architecture. Using a 32 bit version of gcc, e.g., will require some changes to the build scripts.

1. Make sure tup is in your PATH
2. Type tup in the working directory

Windows (Visual Studio 2013 Community)

The build scripts only target 64 bit Windows builds at the moment.

1. Make sure tup is in your PATH
2. Open Visual Studio Tools (from the start menu, not Visual Studio)
3. From the Visual Studio Tools folder, run the "64 bit native" command prompt
4. Change to the Unbox source directory and type tup

Mac

I do not have access to a Mac and have not tried building this yet. If you are a Mac user, please test and report your results and I will update this section.

Tests

To run the test suite set the CONFIG_TEST=y in tup.config and rerun tup.

If a test fails run bin/jconsole -debug test/<path-to-test> to see where the failure is occuring.

Contributing

The preferred ways to contribute code are:

1. Send me a patch and I will review it and apply it to the develop branch
2. Make a new branch off of develop, e.g., myfeature, and make your changes in that branch. When you are done with your changes create a pull request on Github and I will pull, test/edit and then merge into develop.