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A BQN implementation in C

CBQN-specific documentation • source code overview

Running

  1. make
    • Third-party packages and other ways to run BQN are listed here
    • Add CC=cc if clang isn't installed
    • Add FFI=0 if your system doesn't have libffi
    • Use gmake on BSD
    • Add REPLXX=0 if C++ is unavailable (will remove line editing/coloring/name completion in the REPL)
    • Run sudo make install afterwards to install into /usr/local/bin/bqn (a PREFIX=/some/path argument will install to /some/path/bin/bqn); sudo make uninstall to uninstall
    • make clean if anything breaks and you want a clean build slate
  2. ./BQN somefile.bqn to execute a file, or ./BQN for a REPL

Configuration options

The default configuration enables REPLXX & Singeli, and, if not done before, implicitly runs make for-build to build a CBQN for running build/src/build.bqn and compiling Singeli.

Builds with more performance

(TL;DR: use make o3n for local builds on x86-64, but make is fine on other architectures)

The default target (make o3) will target optimizations for the current architecture, but not any further extensions the specific CPU may have.

Thus, performance can be significantly improved by targeting the specific CPU via make o3n (with the usual drawback of -march=native of it not producing a binary portable to other CPUs of the same architecture).

On x86-64, a native build will enable usage of AVX2 (i.e. ability to use 256-bit SIMD vectors instead of 128-bit ones, among other things), and BMI2 if available. But, on aarch64, NEON is always available, so a native build won't give significant benefits.

To produce a binary utilizing AVX2 not specific to any processor, it's possible to do make o3 has=avx2. (has='avx2 bmi2' for targeting both AVX2 & BMI2)

Additionally, on AMD Zen 1 & Zen 2, make o3n has=slow-pdep will further improve certain builtins (Zen 1/2 support BMI2, but their implementation of pdep/pext is so slow that not using it for certain operations is very beneficial).

CBQN currently does not utilize AVX-512 or SVE, or have any SIMD optimizations specific to any architectures other than x86-64 and aarch64.

For native builds, targeted extensions are determined by /proc/cpuinfo (or sysctl machdep.cpu on macOS) and C macros defined as a result of -march=native.

Build flags

CC=... - choose a different C compiler (default is clang)
CXX=... - choose a different C++ compiler; needed only for REPLXX (default is c++)
OUTPUT=path/to/somewhere - change output location; for emcc-o3 it will be the destination folder for BQN.js and BQN.wasm, for everything else - the filename
target_arch=(x86-64|aarch64|generic) - target architecture. Inferred from uname by default. Used for deciding target optimizations.
target_os=(linux|bsd|macos|windows) - target OS. Inferred from uname by default. Used for determining default output names and slight configuration changes.
j=8 - override the default parallel job count (default is the output of nproc)
notui=1 - display build progress in a plain-text format
version=... - specify the version to report in --version (default is commit hash)

REPLXX=0 - disable REPLXX singeli=0 - disable usage of Singeli
FFI=0 - disable •FFI, thus not depending on libffi

f=... - add extra C compiler flags for CBQN file compilation
lf=... - add extra linking flags (LDFLAGS is a synonym)
CCFLAGS=... - add flags for all CC/CXX/linking invocations
REPLXX_FLAGS=... - override replxx build flags (default is -std=c++11 -Os)
CXXFLAGS=... - add additional CXX flags

Alternatively, build/build (aka build.bqn) can be invoked manually, though note that it has slightly different argument naming (see build/build --help) and doesn't have predefined build types (i.e. make o3ng is done as build/build replxx singeli native g)

More build types

  • make o3 - the default build
  • make o3g - effectively make o3 f=-g (custom f=... can still be added on)
  • make c - make o3 but without -O3
  • make shared-o3 - produce a shared library libcbqn.so/libcbqn.dylib/cbqn.dll
  • make shared-c - like make c but for a shared library
  • make emcc-o3 - build with Emscripten emcc
  • make wasi-o3 - build targeting WASI
  • make wasi-reactor-o3 - build producing a WASI Reactor
  • make debug - unoptimized build with extra assertion checks (also includes -g)

All of the above will go through build.bqn. If that causes problems, make o3-makeonly or make c-makeonly can be used. These still enable REPLXX by default, but do not support Singeli. Furthermore, these targets don't support some of the build flags that the others do.

Requirements

CBQN requires either gcc or clang as the C compiler (it defaults to clang as things are primarily optimized for it, but a CC=cc make arg can be added to use the default system compiler), and, optionally, libffi for •FFI, and C++ (requires ≥C++11; defaults to c++, override with CXX=your-c++) for replxx.

There aren't hard requirements for versions of any of those, but nevertheless here are some configurations that CBQN is tested on by dzaima:

x86-64 (Linux):
  gcc 9.5; gcc 11.3; clang 10.0.0; clang 14.0.0
  libffi 3.4.2
  cpu microarchitecture: Haswell
  replxx: g++ 11.3.0
x86 (Linux):
  clang 14.0.0; known to break on gcc - https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=58416
  running on the above x86-64 system, compiled with CCFLAGS=-m32
AArch64 ARMv8-A (within Termux on Android 8):
  using a `lf=-landroid-spawn` make arg after `pkg install libandroid-spawn` to get •SH to work
  clang 15.0.7
  libffi 3.4.4 (structs were broken as of 3.4.3)
  replxx: clang++ 15.0.4

Additionally, CBQN is known to compile as-is on macOS, but Windows builds need WinBQN to set up an appropriate Windows build environment, or be built from Linux by cross-compilation.

The build will additionally attempt to use pkg-config for determining how to include libffi, uname for target_arch and target_os, and nproc for parallel job count, but has defaults if any aren't present (-lffi for linking libffi (+ -ldl on non-BSD), arch → generic, os → linux, j=4), and the behavior of these can be overriden by build options.

Precompiled bytecode

CBQN uses the self-hosted BQN compiler & some parts of the runtime, and therefore needs to be bootstrapped. By default, the CBQN will use precompiled bytecode.

In order to build everything from source, you can:

option 1: use another BQN implementation

  1. dzaima/BQN is a BQN implementation that is completely implemented in Java (clone it & run ./build)
  2. clone mlochbaum/BQN
  3. mkdir -p build/bytecodeLocal/gen
  4. other-bqn-impl ./build/genRuntime path/to/mlochbaum/BQN build/bytecodeLocal
    In the case of the Java impl, java -jar path/to/dzaima/BQN/BQN.jar ./build/genRuntime path/to/mlochbaum/BQN build/bytecodeLocal

option 2: use the bootstrap compilers

  1. clone mlochbaum/BQN
  2. mkdir -p build/bytecodeLocal/gen && make for-bootstrap && ./BQN build/bootstrap.bqn path/to/mlochbaum/BQN

Note that, after either of those, the compiled bytecode may become desynchronized if you later update CBQN without also rebuilding the bytecode. Usage of the submodule can be restored by removing build/bytecodeLocal.

Submodules

Git submodules are used for Singeli, replxx, and bytecode. Thus, CBQN won't build if downloaded just as source files.

Thus, you must either clone the repo (submodules will be automatically initialized/updated as needed), or use local copies of the submodules by linking/copying local versions to build/singeliLocal, build/replxxLocal, and build/bytecodeLocal.

Cross-compilation

You must manually set up a cross-compilation environment. It's possible to pass flags to all CC/CXX/linking invocations via CCFLAGS=..., and LDFLAGS=... to pass ones to the linking step specifically (more configuration options above).

A target_arch=(x86-64|aarch64|generic) make argument must be present (generic will work always, but a more specific argument will enable significant optimizations), as the default is to choose based on uname.

Furthermore, all build targets (except -makeonly ones) will need a non-cross-compiled version of CBQN at build time to run build.bqn and (if enabled) Singeli. For those, a make for-build will need to be ran before the primary build, configured to not cross-compile. (this step only needs a C compiler (default is CC=cc here), and doesn't need libffi, nor a C++ compiler).

License

Most files here are copyright (c) 2021-2023 dzaima & others, GNU GPLv3 only. Exceptions are: