Build-System

libFAUDES C++ sources are largely POSIX compliant and have been verified to compile on various platforms, incl. Linux, Mac OsX and MS Windows. Still, the build process is quite involved and requires certain additional tools. The download page therefore provides precompiled libFAUDES archives including executables of luafaudes and other relevant utilities.

For all other system environments you need to use the standard libFAUDES distribution and re-compile. The required steps are described below.

Application-Developer Targets

For application develoment (i.e. using but not extending libFAUDES) the library should be compiled with the same toolchain as used for the application. We have set up CompileDES as an example on how to organise the development of libFAUDES based applications, including the utilisation of modern IDEs like Qt Creator and MS Visual Studio. We provide some more technical detail on the supported toolchains.

The standard distribution ships with a configured source tree and provides a GNU-Makefile for compilation within POSIX compliant environments. The following application developer targets are supported.

After extracting the libFAUDES archive to e.g. ./libFAUDES, open a shell (aka console, command line, etc) and run

./libFAUDES> make -j20
./libFAUDES> make -j20 tutorial
./libFAUDES> make test

to re-compile libFAUDES. Technically, the GNU-make tool extracts the rules of how exactly the targets are to be built from the the Makefile. The option -j20 tells make to run up to 20 jobs in parallel which significantly speeds up the build process. There are a number of details to be addressed here.

Each make-tool comes with a specific dialect and the provided Makefile requires specifically GNU-make to expand in the intended manner. On Linux and macOS GNU-make is part of the system toolchain and, thus, is readily available by installing C++-development packages or XCode, respectively. On MS Windows there is no concept af a designated system toolchain, even though MS Visual C became quite common with the free-of-cost community editions. Unfortunately, the included nmake-tool will not build libFAUDES. To this end, the MinGW-w64 project provides a variant of the GNU-toolchain toolchain for native MS Windows development and it includes a compatible make tool. The easiest way to get this going is to first install MSYS2 and then to obtain the GNU-toolchain within this environment; e.g., run the package manager from an MSYS2 terminal window:

pacman -S base-devel gcc 

Then, explicitly set the target platform and compile libFAUDES from a MSYS2 terminal:

./libFAUDES> make -j20 FAUDES_PLATFORM=gcc_msys
./libFAUDES> make -j20 FAUDES_PLATFORM=gcc_msys tutorial 
./libFAUDES> make FAUDES_PLATFORM=gcc_msys test 
As an alternative to MSYS2, you can resort to a plain MinGW toolchain, set the PATH variable and use an MS Windows commandline to run
set PATH=%PATH%;C:\Wherever_MinGW_is\bin
C:\libFAUDES> mingw64-make -j20 FAUDES_PLATFORM=gcc_win
C:\libFAUDES> mingw64-make -j20 FAUDES_PLATFORM=gcc_win tutorial 
C:\libFAUDES> mingw64-make FAUDES_PLATFORM=gcc_win test 

The provided Makefile supports five flavors to shape the build process.

The four platforms gcc_linux, gcc_osx, gcc_win and gcc_msys all refer to the GNU-toolchain (or close relatives LLVM/Clang). The corresponding tools can be obtained by the system packamanager (Linux), as part of the XCode developer tool (macOS) or via MSYS2 as indicated above (MS Windows). In order to adjust the various compiler/linker options to the application at hand, it is recommende to cut&past the respective section from the Makefile as a starting point for further tuning. Since libFAUDES is largely developped within gcc_linux and/or gcc_osx environments, it adapts well to the GNU-toolchain.

The fourth platform cl_win addresses the MS compiler cl.exe provided by MS Visual Studio. To use MS Visual C for the development of a libFAUDES based application, it is strongly recommended to compile libFAUDES with the same version of cl.exe as it will be used for application developement, an specically to do so with matching compiler/linker options. Among the vast number of precivable usecases, libFAUDES is currently distributed in two orthogonal shapes that can be selected with the FAUDES_LINKING switch as demonstrated below and that have both been tested to compile with the community edition of MS Vusial C 2015. From the MS Winddows commandline, run

call "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\VC\vcvarsall.bat"  x86_amd64
> mingw64-make -j20 FAUDES_PLATFORM=cl_win FAUDES_LINKING="static debug"

The batch file provided by MS Visual C sets up the environment to the 64bit compilers. Then "FAUDES_LINKING="static debug" directs make to build the archieve faudesd.lib. While it links dynamically against the C libraries in their debug variant, faudesd.lib isitself is meant for static linking with an host application. Relevant compiler options are /MDd and /EHsc, in some cases /Zi may also be of interest. Note that applications with static linking to libFAUDES may only be distributed under terms of the GPL license. For dynamic linking in release mode, we have set up

> mingw64-make -j20 FAUDES_PLATFORM=cl_win FAUDES_LINKING="shared"

to build the shared object faudes.dll along with the linker archieve faudes.lib, now using /MD and /EHsc. For application development in release mode, one directs the linker to faudes.lib which results in a dynamic linkage with faudes.dll, i.e., one may distribute the application together with the file faudes.dll.

Library-Developer Targets

When adding or removing libFAUDES plug-ins, the build-system needs to configure the source tree and generate UI and API documentation. In this stage, the current build-system relies on a number of more or less common Unix tools. For the following library developer targets we recommend a Unix-style environment:

Most Linux distributions come with Perl, doxygen and SWIG. The latter may require installation, e.g., for Debian

sudo apt install swig

Here, the particular version can be crucial --- we have positive confirmation ranging from v1.3.36 up to v4.1.1; cross-configuration for Windows/VS-compiler requires at least 3.02, however, the early 3.xx series seems to produce some spurious warnings with Linux/gcc. In the case you rely on older versions of SWIG, you may want to test the a tweaked versions of typemaps.i archieved as ./plugins/luabindings/src/ and taken from SWIG v2.0.10.

For development on a macOS system, there are various ways to obtain the required tools. As of libFAUDES 2.04, we use MacPorts to install SWIG and doxygen, e.g.,

port install swig doxygen    

For development on a Windows system, we recommend to use either Cygwin or MSYS2 as close-to-POSIX environments. As of libFAUDES 2.32b, we are testing with MSYS2 version 20240113 on Windows 10. Required packages can be installed from a MSYS2 terminal window, e.g.:

pacman -S swig perl doxygen ncurses-devel libreadline-devel 

To re-configure and compile libFAUDES sources from scratch, you may run

> make dist-clean
> make configure
> make 
> make tutorial
> make test

When developing a plug-in, it is advisable to edit the main Makefile to only eanable a minimal set of plug-ins. This will keep compilation times reasonably short. In particular, the luabindings plug-in depends on every single header file and the build process will recreate all luabindings from scratch when you edit any one header file.

Reference Documentation Processing

libFAUDES uses doxygen as a professional tool to generate the C++ API documentation. However, we did not yet find a similar tool for the user-reference. In order to still have some systematic approach to a user-level documentation, the libFAUDES build-system uses the run-time-interface as a basis. The compilation process invokes a number of home-grown tools which may need a re-design in due course. However, some care has been taken to have a consistent input format that encodes relevant structural data. In the meanwhile, we would like to encourage developers to (a) contribute to the user-reference to advertise their plug-ins and (b) stick to the below conventions where ever possible to ease revisions of the build process.

RTI Definitions

A plug-in should provide one or more RTI definition files that define a URL and a list of keywords per user relevant faudes-function or faudes-type. The first keyword will be interpreted as section-name. Thus, the provided RTI definition files implicitly define the overall section structure of the user-reference. The section name typically matches the plug-in name. By convention, the URL consists of a filename and a location. The filename should start with the section name followed by an underscore. The location should match the respective function or type name.

Example, taken from cfl_definitions.rti

<FunctionDefinition name="CoreFaudes::LanguageConcatenate" [...] > 
<Documentation ref="corefaudes_regular.html#LanguageConcatenate"> 
Concatenates two languages.
</Documentation> 
<Keywords> 
CoreFaudes    "regular expressions"   generator     language      concatenate   
</Keywords> 
[...]
</FunctionDefinition> 

Documentation Source Files

A plug-in must provide documentation files corresponding to the URLs defined in the RTI definition files. As all libFAUDES documentation, the provided files have the extension *.fref and are processed by ref2html to generate plain XHTML output. The contents of an *.fref-file is expected to be well-formed XML with outer tag <ReferencePage> and otherwise using XHTML markup. More precisely, the outer tag <ReferencePage> corresponds to the <Body> tag from XHTML. For a selfcontained organization of the overall reference documentation, <ReferencePage> supports attributes to indicate chapter, section, page and title of the respective page. The following conventions apply:

Given all reference pages, the chapter, section and page-attributes implicitly define the overall documentation structure, used to automatically generate tables of contents and to provide consistent navigation. The title-attributes are cosemetic.

Example, taken from corefaudes_regular.fref

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" standalone="no"?>
<!DOCTYPE ReferencePage SYSTEM "http://www.faudes.org/dtd/1.0/referencepage.dtd">
<ReferencePage chapter="Reference" section="CoreFaudes" page="RegularExpressions" title="CoreFaudes - Regular Expressions">

<h1>
Functions related to Regular Expressions
</h1>

<p>
Regular expressions extend the <a href="corefaudes_langboolean.html">boolean algebra on languages</a> 
by the Kleene-closure and language concatenation operation. Additionally,  functions for the generating 
elements are provided, i.e. full- and alphabet language.
</p>

[... more HTML markup ... ]

</ReferencePage>

For convenience, the tool ref2html will recognise and substitute additional markup to support a consistent layout.

Note: A DTD file for the validation of documentation input files is provided. It is recommended to use an XML tool like xmllint or an XML editor in the process of editing documentation files.

Processing

To trigger a re-build of the user-reference, use

> make rti-clean
> make rti

This will

 

 

libFAUDES 2.32f --- 2024.12.22 --- with "synthesis-observer-observability-diagnosis-hiosys-iosystem-multitasking-coordinationcontrol-timed-simulator-iodevice-luabindings-hybrid-example-pybindings"