Installing

The easiest way to install Fil-C is using a binary release. It's also possible to build from source.

Fil-C currently only supports Linux/X86_64.

Binary Release

You can download binary releases from the Fil-C GitHub.

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

./setup.sh

from the directory that you unpacked it to (for example /home/pizlo/filc-0.670-linux-x86_64). At that point, you can run the compiler using build/bin/clang or build/bin/clang++ (or via absolute path, for example /home/pizlo/filc-0.670-linux-x86_64/build/bin/clang).

Note that the Fil-C libraries are in the pizfix/lib directory, and the headers are in pizfix/include.

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.

Source Release

Clone Fil-C from GitHub:

git clone https://github.com/pizlonator/fil-c.git

You can build just the base Fil-C (what comes in the binary release) by doing:

./build_all_fast.sh

In the fil-c directory. If you want to also build the Fil-C corpus, which includes a bunch of programs ported to Fil-C (like Python, zsh, and others)), then do:

./build_all.sh

Try It Out

Consider this simple C program; let's call it hello.c:

#include <stdio.h>

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

You can compile it using <path to Fil-C>/build/bin/clang like so:

build/bin/clang -O2 -g -o hello hello.c

Similarly C++ just works:

#include <iostream>

using namespace std;

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

This builds with clang++ like so:

build/bin/clang++ -O2 -g -o hello hello.cpp

For examples of Fil-C catching memory safety issues, see InvisiCaps By Example. For a list of programs that have been ported to Fil-C, see Programs That Work.