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 git haskell-stack make pkg-config procps

On older distributions (like Ubuntu 20.04), stack is too old to properly function and needs to be upgraded first.

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

Mac OS X

brew install haskell-stack pkg-config

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