Building & Installation

Instructions for building and installing the slang library and tools.

Getting the Source

All source code is hosted on GitHub

git clone https://github.com/MikePopoloski/slang.git

git submodules are used for some dependencies, so they need to be pulled as well:

git submodule update --init --recursive

Dependencies

slang requires the following dependencies in order to build:

python 3
CMake (3.15 or later)
C++17 compatible compiler

Quick Start

Instructions on quickly getting a build going for common platforms.

On many common systems, a modern C++ compiler is not configured as the default. This assumes you've installed GCC 9 and that it's available on your path, and that you want a release build that will be installed to /usr/local/bin.

mkdir build && cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=g++-9 -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local/bin ..
make -j8

Tests are built by default. You can run them via ctest:

ctest

Or run the unit tests directly:

bin/unittests

Installation:

make install

Windows

VisualStudio 2019 has built-in support for cmake; simply open the slang root folder and press build.

Build Options

Besides the built-in cmake options, there are slang-specific options that may be set to customize the build:

Option	Description	Default
SLANG_INCLUDE_TESTS	Include tests in the build	ON
SLANG_INCLUDE_DOCS	Include docs in the build	OFF
SLANG_INCLUDE_LLVM	Include LLVM in the build for generating simulation binaries	OFF
BUILD_SHARED_LIBS	Build a shared library instead of static	OFF
SLANG_COVERAGE	Enable Clang code coverage	OFF
SLANG_SANITIZERS	A list of Clang sanitizers to include in the build	""
FUZZ_TARGET	Turn on to enable some changes to make binaries easier to fuzz test	OFF
CI_BUILD	Enable additional longer-running tests for automated builds	OFF
DOXYGENPY_PATH	When building docs, the path to the doxygen.py tool	""
SLANG_USE_SYSTEM_LIBS	Configures the build to use dependencies already installed on the system (such as fmt and xxhash) instead of the ones included in the repo	OFF

Build Scripts

This section documents scripts that are invoked during the build that may be of general interest or useful to know if you're modifying how the build works.

Version info

On every build, the current git revision hash is queried and included in the Version.cpp header to expose to the rest of the library. If the revision is unchanged from the last build no additional work will be done.

Syntax generation

Syntax nodes in slang are expressed in the scripts/syntax.txt file and processed during the build into generated C++ classes by the syntax_gen.py script.

Diagnostic generation

Diagnostics, similarly to syntax nodes, are expressed in the scripts/diagnostics.txt file and processed into C++ definitions by the diagnostic_gen.py script.

Building Documentation

This section contains instructions for building the documentation.

Dependencies

doxygen - at least 1.8.17
doc build environment

Steps

Run cmake with docs enabled and the path to the doxygen.py script in the m.css checkout:

cmake -DSLANG_INCLUDE_DOCS=ON -DDOXYGENPY_PATH=/path/to/m.css/documentation/doxygen.py

Run the build:

make docs

The output website is located at docs/html/