Building Acton from source

If you want to mess around with Acton itself, like hack on the compiler or add to the standard library of modules you will need to build the Acton system from source.

Get the code

git clone git@github.com:actonlang/acton.git

Build dependencies

Install the build time dependencies.

Debian / Ubuntu

apt install bzip2 curl g++ haskell-stack make procps zlib1g-dev

Debian 12 (bookworm) or Ubuntu 23.04 or newer are required to get a fresh enough version of stack that works with GHC 9. On older distributions, stack needs to be upgraded first.

stack upgrade
export PATH=~/.local/bin:$PATH

Mac OS X

brew install haskell-stack

Building the Acton system

Run make in the project root:

make -j

-j is for parallel make using as many CPU cores as available on your machine.

Running tests

make test