the
Nit
Programming Language

a fun language for serious programming

Starting and Re-Bootstrapping

The Nit tools are written in Nit, it means you need a Nit compiler in order to compile the Nit compiler.

During the make, the original Nit compiler is compiled from C code (in /c_src).

$ git clone https://github.com/nitlang/nit.git
$ cd nit
$ make
$ cd src
$ ./ncall.sh

ncall.sh performs a full bootstrap of the compiler (the original make does only two passes). More specifically, ncall.sh:

  • compiles nitc.nit with the compiler c_src/nitg so we get src/nitc
  • compiles nitc.nit with src/nitc and we get src/nitc_2
  • compiles nitc.nit with src/nitc_2 and we get src/nitc_3
  • compiles nitc.nit with src/nitc_3 and we get src/nitc_4
  • compile examples/hello_world.nit with src/nitc_4 and run it to verify that src/nitc_4 is minimally functional.

Note that the Nit code of the compiler is written with some legacy Nit: all modern functionalities of Nit are not always usable since it is the primitive compiler (c_src/nitg) that is used.

One of the standard error of the nit tool developer is to break the bootstrap, it means that the Nit compiler is written in an incompatible way with the primitive compiler. Regularly executing ./ncall.sh helps to check that the bootstrap is not broken.

On some occasions, the C-code in c_src is updated. The script src/mkcsrc is then used to regenerate a new c_src file by running a special compilation of nitc.