Installing The /opt/fil Distribution

My favorite way to install Fil-C is using the /opt/fil binary distribution, since it:

• Installs everything into /opt/fil for peaceful coexistence with your usual Linux userland.
• Puts the Fil-C compiler in /opt/fil/bin/filcc and /opt/fil/bin/fil++.
• Includes useful programs compiled with Fil-C, like memory safe sudo, OpenSSH, tmux, curl, and git.

The /opt/fil distribution of Fil-C supports Linux/X86_64 and Linux/ARM64. The ARM64 port is still experimental. The latest 0.685 release is the first release of /opt/fil to support ARM64. While the X86_64 version of /opt/fil has been tested on many Linux distributions (Fedora, CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, MintOS, etc), the ARM64 version has only been tested on Ubuntu.

Download And Install

You can download binary releases from the Fil-C GitHub. The /opt/fil binary releases are named optfil-0.685-linux-x86_64.tar.xz and optfil-0.685-linux-aarch64.tar.xz.

Once you download a release and unpack it, simply run:

sudo ./setup.sh

Assuming the script finds no issues, it will prompt you if you really want to unpack the /opt/fil. Type YES (in all caps).

This style of Fil-C installation places all Fil-C headers, libraries, and tools in the /opt/fil slice. The compiler automatically knows how to find those headers and libraries and will link programs in such a way that they will look for their dependent shared libraries there.

Try It Out

First, add /opt/fil/bin to your $PATH:

export PATH=/opt/fil/bin:$PATH

Then assuming you have this simple C program called hello.c:

#include <stdio.h>

int main() {
    printf("Hello from Fil-C!\n");
    return 0;
}

You can compile it using the Fil-C compiler like so:

filcc -O2 -g -o hello hello.c

Note that this is also using Fil-C since filcc is invoking a memory-safe build of the GNU linker (/opt/fil/bin/ld).

Similarly C++ just works:

#include <iostream>

using namespace std;

int main() {
    cout << "Hello!" << endl;
    return 0;
}

This builds with clang++ like so:

fil++ -O2 -g -o hello hello.cpp

The /opt/fil distribution also includes useful programs, like ssh, mg, bash, tmux, sudo, git, and curl. You can even launch a memory-safe OpenSSH server using /opt/fil/sbin/sshd!