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Building XTC From Source

This document covers all Gradle build details for the XVM project: tasks, distributions, clean semantics, debugging, versioning, and publishing.

See also: Gradle Fundamentals for developers new to Gradle.

Maven Artifacts and IDE Integration

For Most Developers: Use the XTC Gradle plugin in your IDE instead of command-line tools:

// In your build.gradle.kts
plugins {
    id("org.xtclang.xtc") version "0.4.4-SNAPSHOT"
}

Maven Repository Access:

repositories {
    // For snapshots and releases (current)
    maven {
        url = uri("https://maven.pkg.github.com/xtclang/xvm")
        credentials {
            username = System.getenv("GITHUB_USERNAME")
            password = System.getenv("GITHUB_TOKEN") // needs read:packages scope
        }
    }
    // For local development builds
    mavenLocal()
    // Maven Central (coming soon - will eliminate need for GitHub credentials)
    mavenCentral()
}

Future Repository Access: We plan to publish Maven artifacts to Maven Central (Sonatype OSSRH), which will eliminate the need for GitHub user/token configuration. This will make XDK artifacts available through standard Maven Central without authentication.

Gradle Plugin Portal: The XTC language plugin is published to the Gradle Plugin Portal, and we're moving toward continuous publication of plugin updates. This means you can use the plugin without any special repository configuration:

// No special repositories needed - fetched from Gradle Plugin Portal
plugins {
    id("org.xtclang.xtc") version "0.4.4-SNAPSHOT"
}

The plugin handles all XDK dependencies automatically - most XTC developers won't need the command-line tools.

Gradle Build Tasks and XDK Setup

The XVM project uses Gradle for building and distribution management. Understanding the different build tasks and installation options is essential for development and deployment.

Core Build Tasks

  • ./gradlew build - Executes the complete build lifecycle including compilation, testing, and packaging. This creates all XDK components but doesn't install them locally.

  • ./gradlew xdk:installDist - Installs the complete XDK distribution to xdk/build/install/xdk/ with cross-platform shell script launchers (xec, xcc) ready to use immediately. This is the recommended installation method for development.

Distribution Tasks

The project provides two main distribution variants:

Installation Tasks (creates local installations):

  1. ./gradlew xdk:installDist - Recommended default installation with cross-platform shell script launchers

    • Output: xdk/build/install/xdk/
    • Contents: Cross-platform script launchers (xec, xcc, xec.bat, xcc.bat)
    • Ready to use: Just add bin/ to your PATH - no configuration needed

  2. ./gradlew xdk:installWithNativeLaunchersDist - Platform-specific native binary launchers

    • Output: xdk/build/install/xdk-native-{os}_{arch}/ (e.g., xdk-native-linux_amd64/)
    • Contents: Platform-specific native binary launchers (xec, xcc)
    • Ready to use: Just add bin/ to your PATH - no configuration needed

Archive Tasks (creates distributable archives):

  1. ./gradlew xdk:distZip / ./gradlew xdk:distTar - Recommended default archives with cross-platform script launchers

    • Output: xdk-{version}.zip / xdk-{version}.tar.gz
    • Contents: Cross-platform script launchers (xec, xcc, xec.bat, xcc.bat)
    • Ready to use: Extract and add bin/ to PATH

  2. ./gradlew xdk:withNativeLaunchersDistZip / ./gradlew xdk:withNativeLaunchersDistTar - Platform-specific native binary launchers

    • Output: xdk-{version}-native-{os}_{arch}.zip / xdk-{version}-native-{os}_{arch}.tar.gz
    • Contents: Platform-specific native launchers (xec, xcc)
    • Ready to use: Extract and add bin/ to PATH

Distribution Differences

Default Distribution (installDist, distZip, distTar):

  • Cross-platform shell script launchers (xec, xcc, xec.bat, xcc.bat)
  • Ready to use immediately - just add bin/ to your PATH
  • Recommended for all users

Native Launcher Distribution (withNativeLaunchers*):

  • Platform-specific native binary launchers (xec, xcc)
  • Ready to use immediately - just add bin/ to your PATH
  • Alternative for specific platform requirements

The archive tasks produce the same XDK installation content as their corresponding installation tasks, but package them as ZIP and tar.gz files in the xdk/build/distributions/ directory. These archives are suitable for distribution and deployment to other systems.

Example archive filenames (for version 0.4.4-SNAPSHOT):

  • xdk-0.4.4-SNAPSHOT.zip - Default: Cross-platform script launchers
  • xdk-0.4.4-SNAPSHOT-native-macos_arm64.zip - macOS ARM64 native launchers

Quick Development Setup

For developers who want a working XDK installation on their local machine:

  1. Build and install:

    ./gradlew xdk:installDist

  2. Add the XDK bin directory to your PATH:

    # Default installation with script launchers (recommended):
export PATH="/path/to/xvm/xdk/build/install/xdk/bin:$PATH"

# Alternative: Platform-specific binary launchers (adjust {os}_{arch} as needed):
export PATH="/path/to/xvm/xdk/build/install/xdk-native-linux_amd64/bin:$PATH"

  3. Set XDK_HOME environment variable:

    # Default installation (recommended):
export XDK_HOME="/path/to/xvm/xdk/build/install/xdk"

# Alternative: Platform-specific binary launchers (adjust {os}_{arch} as needed):
export XDK_HOME="/path/to/xvm/xdk/build/install/xdk-native-linux_amd64"

Tip for Local Development: You can create a symlink from your home directory to simplify path management:

# Recommended for development:
ln -sf "/path/to/xvm/xdk/build/install/xdk" ~/xdk-latest
export PATH="~/xdk-latest/bin:$PATH"
export XDK_HOME="~/xdk-latest"

This approach shouldn't be controversial since production installations are handled by package managers anyway.

Important: The default installDist task creates a complete, self-contained XDK installation with proper classpath configuration and ready-to-use launchers. There's no need to run platform-specific configuration scripts like cfg_macos.sh - these are legacy approaches that have been superseded by the current Gradle-based distribution system.

Environment Configuration

Once you have an XDK installation (via any of the install group tasks), configure your environment:

  • XDK_HOME: Set this to the root of your XDK installation directory (e.g., xdk/build/install/xdk)
  • PATH: Add $XDK_HOME/bin to your PATH to access xec and xcc launchers

When XDK_HOME is properly set and the launchers are in your PATH, any xec (Ecstasy runner) or xcc (Ecstasy compiler) command will automatically use the correct XDK libraries and classpath.

Understanding the Build Artifacts

After running any install task, you'll find:

  • lib/ - Core Ecstasy modules (ecstasy.xtc, collections.xtc, etc.)
  • javatools/ - Java-based toolchain (javatools.jar, bridge modules)
  • bin/ - Executable launchers (if using launcher variants)
    • xec - Ecstasy code runner
    • xcc - Ecstasy compiler

The difference between build and installDist is that build creates all the necessary artifacts but leaves them in their individual project build directories, while installDist assembles everything into a unified, deployable XDK structure ready for use.

Understanding Gradle Clean vs Make Clean

Important: Gradle's clean is fundamentally different from traditional make clean:

  • Make clean: Simply deletes all build outputs ("delete everything" semantic)
  • Gradle clean: Intelligently removes only outputs that need to be rebuilt, leveraging Gradle's incremental build system and caching

When to Use Clean

./gradlew clean

Gradle's incremental build system tracks input/output relationships and only rebuilds what has changed. You should rarely need to run clean because:

  • Gradle automatically detects when files need to be rebuilt
  • The build cache preserves intermediate outputs for faster rebuilds
  • Clean invalidates all cached work, making subsequent builds slower

Only use clean when:

  • You suspect build cache corruption
  • You're troubleshooting unusual build behavior
  • You're preparing for a completely fresh build for testing

Composite Build Limitation

Critical: Due to our parallel composite build architecture, never combine clean with other build tasks in a single command:

# DON'T DO THIS - will cause build failures
./gradlew clean build

# DO THIS INSTEAD - run separately
./gradlew clean
./gradlew build

The parallel composite build runs subprojects concurrently, and clean will interfere with other tasks that are simultaneously creating files, leading to race conditions and build failures.

Should you, for any reason, need to clear the caches, and really start fresh, you can run the script

./bin/purge-all-build-state.sh

Or do the equivalent actions manually:

  1. Close any open XTC projects in your IDEs, to avoid restarting them with a large state change under the hood. Optionally, also close your IDE processes.
  2. Kill all Gradle daemons.
  3. Delete the $GRADLE_USER_HOME/cache and $GRADLE_USER_HOME/daemons directories. NOTE: this invalidates caches for all Gradle builds on your current system, and rebuilds a new Gradle version.
  4. Run git clean -xfd in your build root. Note that this may also delete any IDE configuration that resides in your build. You may want to preserve e.g. the .idea directory, and then you can do git clean -xfd -e .idea or perform a dry run git clean -xfdn, to see what will be deleted. Note that if you are at this level of purging stuff, it's likely a bad idea to hang on to your IDE state anyway.

Debugging the Build

The build should be debuggable through any IDE, for example IntelliJ, using its Gradle tooling API hook. You can run any task in the project in debug mode from within the IDE, with breakpoints in the build scripts and/or the underlying non-XTC code, for example in Javatools, to debug the compiler, runner or disassembler.

Augmenting the Build Output

XTC follow Gradle best practise, and you can run the build, or any task therein, with the standard verbosity flags. For example, to run the build with more verbose output, use:

./gradlew build --info --stacktrace

The build also supports Gradle build scans, which can be generated with:

./gradlew build --scan --stacktrace

Note that build scans are published to the Gradle online build scan repository (as configured through the gradle-enterprise settings plugin.), so make sure that you aren't logging any secrets, and avoid publishing build scans in "--debug" mode, as it may be a potential security hazard.

You can also combine the above flags, and use all other standard Gradle flags, like --stacktrace, and so on.

Tasks

To see the list of available tasks for the XDK build, use:

./gradlew tasks

Versioning and Publishing XDK Artifacts

  • Use publishLocal to publish an XDK build to the local Maven repository only.
  • Use publish to publish to both local Maven and remote repositories (GitHub Packages, optionally Maven Central and Gradle Plugin Portal). A GitHub token with permissions is required for remote publishing.
  • For release versions (without -SNAPSHOT suffix), you must use publish -PallowRelease=true to prevent accidental releases.

Note: Some publish tasks may have race conditions due to parallel execution. If you encounter publishing errors:

./gradlew clean
./gradlew publishTask --no-parallel

Remember to run clean and the publish task separately due to our composite build architecture.

The group and version of the current XDK build and the XTC Plugin are currently defined in the properties file "version.properties". Here, we define the version of the current XDK and XTC Plugin, as well as their group. The default behavior is to only define the XDK, since at this point, the Plugin, while decoupled, tracks and maps to the XDK version pretty much 1-1. This can be taken apart with different semantic versioning, should we need to. Nothing is assuming the plugin has the same version or group as the XDK. It's just convenient for time being.

The file gradle/libs.versions.toml contains all internal and external by-artifact version dependencies to the XDK project. If you need to add a new plugin, library, or bundle, always define its details in this version catalog, and nowhere else. The XDK build logic, will dynamically plug in in values for the XDK and XTC Plugin artifacts that will be used only as references outside this file.

TODO: In the future we will also support tagging and publishing releases on GitHub, using JReleaser or a similar framework.

Typically, the project version of anything that is unreleased should be "x.y.z-SNAPSHOT", and the first action after tagging and uploading a release of the XDK, is usually changing the release version in "VERSION" in the xvm repository root, and (if the plugin is versioned separately, optionally in "plugin/VERSION") both by incrementing the micro version, and by adding a SNAPSHOT suffix. You will likely find yourself working in branches that use SNAPSHOT versions until they have made it into a release train. The CI/CD pipeline can very likely handle this automatically.

Bleeding Edge for Developers

If you would like to contribute to the Ecstasy Project, use the latest development version by building and installing locally:

./gradlew xdk:installDist

Note: this would be done after installing the XDK via brew, or through any other installation utility, depending on your platform. This will overwrite several libraries and files in any local installation.

For more information about the XTC DSL, please see the README.md file in the "plugin" project.

Releasing and Publishing

This is mostly relevant to the XDK development team with release management privileges. A version of the workflow for adding XTC releases is described here.

We plan to move to an automatic release model in the very near future, utilizing JRelease (and JPackage to generate our binary launchers). As an XTC/XDK developer, you do not have to understand all the details of the release model. The somewhat incomplete and rather manual release mode is current described here for completeness. It will soon be replaced with something familiar.

XDK Platform Releases

  1. Take the current version of master and create a release branch.
  2. Set the VERSION in the release branch project root to reflect the version of the release. Typically an ongoing development branch will be a "-SNAPSHOT" suffixed release, but not an official XTC release, which just has a group:name:version number
  3. Build, tag and add the release using the GitHub release plugin.

XDK Platform Publishing

We have verified credentials for artifacts with the group "org.xtclang" at the best known community portals, and will start publishing there, as soon as we have an industrial strength release model completed.

The current semi-manual process looks like this:

  1. ./gradlew publish to build the artifacts and verify they work. This will publish the artifacts to a local repositories and the XTC GitHub org repository.
  2. To publish the plugin to Gradle Plugin Portal: ./gradlew :plugin:publishPlugins (publish the plugin to gradlePortal)
  3. To publish the XDK distro to Maven Central: (... TODO ... )

You can already refer to the XDK and the XTC Plugin as external artifacts for your favourite XTC project, either by manually setting up a link to the XTC Org GitHub Maven Repository like this:

repositories {
   maven {
     url = https://maven.pkg.github.com/xtclang/xvm
     credentials {
        username = <your github user name>
        token = <a personal access token with read:package privileges on GitHub Maven Packages>
   }
}

or by simply publishing the XDK and XDK Plugin to your mavenLocal repository, and adding that to the configuration of your XTC project, if it's not there already:

repositories {
   mavenLocal()
}

Appendix: Gradle Fundamentals

This project follows industry-standard Gradle/Maven conventions. The build is designed to "just work" - clone and run ./gradlew build.

For developers new to Gradle, we've documented the essential concepts you'll need:

Assumed Gradle Knowledge - Covers the build lifecycle, source sets, artifacts, repositories, and the Gradle wrapper.

Key points:

  • Always use ./gradlew (the wrapper), never a system-installed gradle
  • The build uses standard Maven artifact conventions (group:name:version)
  • Gradle's clean is different from make clean - you rarely need it