README for asdlGen version 2.0-beta

Daniel C. Wang

February 14, 2000

This is beta release asdlGen. Many of the internals have been significantly reworked, and most of the major internal interfaces have been documented. There have been also several significant changes to various backends, and a different compilation model for the generated code.

In the past asdlGen assumed the existence of several support libraries that it would link with the source code produced by it. This made installing asdlGen quiet a non-trivial task. In the new model asdlGen will by default emit all the necessary source code needed to compile the world, rather than assuming the existence of asdlGen specific libraries. The C code still requires libcii.a which is included verbatim but not built in the current distribution.

There's still work to do, most importantly documenting many of the new features and providing some good examples. The old user manual is out of date but it's better then nothing.

Also, asdlGen is designed to make inter-language operation easier. It may not exploit or produce the most idiomatic code for a given language, advice on how to improve the code for a given language will be appreciated.


% ./configure --prefix=<install-prefix>
% make all

Dumps a SML/NJ heap for asdlGen in src/sml/. The install rules will change in the future. It currently doesn't produce any stand-alone executables.

Major Changes/Features include

1. COPYRIGHT

2. Installation