This is an experimental C++(11+)/native compiler backend for PureScript. It attempts to generate "sane", debuggable, and portable C++ code as an intermediate language, which is then compiled to a native executable binary. This enables easy interoperability with existing C/C++ frameworks and libraries on a number of platforms.

Performance

• No runtime system (beyond some support classes and the standard C++(11+) runtime library)
• For automatic memory management, uses native C++(11+) reference counting (std::shared_ptr)
• Uses PureScript's normal tail call optimization techniques for generated C++ code

Differences from PureScript:

• Foreign imports are C++(11+) (or C) instead of JavaScript (FFI examples)
• No C++-specific REPL

Other notes:

• PureScript arrays are implemented using std::deque (random access O(1))
• String types are implemented using either C-strings (for literals) or std::string
• Number is C++ double, Int is C++ int, Char is std::string (single UTF-8 entity), Boolean is bool

Future ideas:

• Nice facilities (modules) for concurrency/parallelism, using std::thread, std::async, etc. under the hood
• BigInt via GNU GMP (or an alternative)

Requirements

• Haskell Stack (if you're running macOS 10.13+, you can use pre-built binaries from here)
• A C++11-capable toolchain, e.g. recent versions of clang, gcc, Microsoft Visual Studio 2015
• GNU Make is the default supported build tool, but you should be able to use your favorite C++ build system, tools, debuggers, etc.

Getting Started

This assumes you are running OS X or a Unix-like system (Linux, *BSD, etc.).

If you're running macOS 10.13+ (High Sierra or later), you can avoid building it yourself by using these pre-built snapshot binaries, but make sure you've installed a recent version of purescript first.

1. Make sure you have developer tools for your system installed. For OS X, you'll need a recent version of Xcode. For Linux, etc., you need gcc 4.9.2 or later, including g++ support. You can also use clang 3.5 or later, but it still requires gcc for its C++ standard libraries.

2. Create a working directory wherever you like, and a src subdirectory under it, which will be where you will place your own PureScript source files.

3. Under your working directory, also create an ffi subdirectory, which will be where you will place your own C/C++ FFI source files.

4. Copy this Makefile into your working directory.

5. Use PureScript's standard psc-package utility to add and manage package dependencies.

6. You should now be ready to build a PureScript program.

• As stated above, place your source file(s) in the working directory's src subdirectory and execute make. If your machine has multiple cores, you might want to use make -jN, where N is the number of cores.

• This will generate the C++ source tree for your program and then build an executable binary. The resulting executable will be in the bin subdirectory under the output directory and called main (so output/bin/main, by default). Source files will be in output/src/*