Getting Started

What is this

This is an implementation and a certain kind of redesign over the old Plan 9 ANSI/POSIX Environment (APE). Now APEX runs in amd64, implements C99 and POSIX.1-2008/IEEE Std 1003.1, and is built mainly with Clang, though it's suitable to be built with GCC too.

This file is a quick list of instructions to get you started quickly.

Prerequisites

To build APEX and play with it, you need to have git, Clang or GCC, binutils and (GNU) make installed. And of course, a running Harvey OS to use it. On a Debian, Ubuntu or other .deb system, you should be able to get going with

sudo aptitude install git build-essential

Working with GitHub

Before at all, you can clone the repo wherever you want, now APEX for Harvey is tree independent. So you needn't use anything like $HARVEY/sys/src/apex and its related bin/lib/include directories anymore.

We use GitHub pull-request method for code-review as in Harvey main GitHub repository. So check this if you want to submit pull requests:

• Sending a patch

Assuming you cloned the repo in your machine, it's now all set. You can build the whole thing just by running

APEX=`pwd` OS=linux ARCH=amd64 make

which should take maybe less than a minute. It will build libap.a only. That is all that you need to compile ANSI/POSIX C programs for Harvey.

You can build libap internal parts separately setting up APEX variable to top of the tree, OS and ARCH properly and typing make inside every directory of sources included (amd64, gen, math, plan9, posix, stdio, stdlib, mutibyte...).

Once building is complete, you can test in Harvey (see its wiki).

Rules and tricks to patch commits or fix code with GitHub pull-request method are the same as in Harvey's repo. (One more time see Harvey's wiki).

Running your programs

You can use the ninep server to serving your APEX programs (see Harvey's wiki). In fact, you can put your APEX binaries wherever you want, into Harvey's tree or not. That includes other file servers, imported directories, binded or mounted directories, etc... Just ensure that you have in your Harvey's path the destination directory to your Harvey's APEX programs. Putting inside of one of the standard directories for binaries or using bind or mount.

Example:

ajc@ajc-machine:~/source/c$ gcc -c -I /home/ajc/source/apex/amd64/include -I /home/ajc/source/apex/include -I . -O2 -mno-red-zone -ffreestanding -fno-builtin -nostdlib -nostdinc -trigraphs -Wall -Wuninitialized -g hello-posix.c

ajc@ajc-Vostro-3560:~/source/c$ ld -o hello-posix -static hello-posix.o -L /home/ajc/source/apex/amd64/lib -L /home/ajc/source/harvey/amd64/lib -e_main -lap -lc

ajc@ajc-Vostro-3560:~/source/c$ cat hello-posix.c 

#include <stdio.h>

int
main (void)
{
	printf("Hello world from ANSI!\n");
	return 0;
}

harvey@cpu% /apex/amd64/bin/hello-posix
Hello world from ANSI!

As you can see, I have APEX repo in my home, under source/apex. Note that we used -L pointing to where I have Harvey's runtime libs in order to link against libc.a (-lc). That's all you need from Harvey to compile ANSI programs to Harvey. After that I setup ninep and mounted my APEX repo in /apex, to test my hello world.