Support in ATS for using external packages

[gmhwxi]

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# For the moment, I am using ats-lang-users for ats-lang-devel.
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For people interested in this, please feel free to post your comments.

In the near future, I hope to set up a packaging system for ATS. It is
long overdue.

I looked around and tried npm (JS) and composer (PHP). For the moment,
I plan to use npm (but this choice should have minimal impact, if at all, on
the support for packaging system in ATS).

One can say that being explicit is a theme in the design of ATS. There is
no exception this time. A environment variable PATSHOMERELOCS is to
be introduced (which may or may not replace the variable PATSHOMERELOC
that is currently in use).

PATSHOMERELOCS is essentially a collection of paths separation by colon (:)
(or other characters).

Say that you have used npm to install a package FOO globally. Then you may have

/usr/local/lib/node_modules/

FOO

on your system.

Please make sure that /usr/local/lib/node_modules is one of the paths in PATSHOMERELOCS.

You may use FOO in your code in the following ways:

#include "${PATSHOMERELOCS}/FOO/foo.hats"
#staload "${PATSHOMERELOCS}/FOO/foo.sats"
#staload _ = "${PATSHOMELOCS}/FOO/foo.hats"

By mentioning PATSHOMERELOCS in a loading path is what I refer to as being explicit.

This should address the issue of compilation to C involving external packages. Obviously, we also
need to compile the generated C code into object files. This latter issue can be addressed by making
use of pkg-config properly. We just need some experiments and then form certain guidelines for doing it.

Cheers!

[Steinway Wu]

I just played with it on my ats-utils package. I published it here, https://www.npmjs.com/package/ats-utils so that others can try out. It is under MIT license. 

[gmhwxi]

I have added the support for PATSHOMERELOCS as is outlined
above. It will go into ATS2-0.3.0, which will be released shortly.

If you would like to try it now, please just download the GitHub version
of ATS2.

Cheers!

--Hongwei

On Tuesday, January 3, 2017 at 2:45:09 PM UTC-5, gmhwxi wrote:

[Steinway Wu]

It seems that the change breaks the build of ATS-Postiats-contrib. I can no longer compile atscc2js/2erl/2clj etc. It can not find source files any more and reporting errors like ".PATSRELOCROOT-$USER/SATS/json.sats is not available". 

On Tuesday, January 3, 2017 at 2:45:09 PM UTC-5, gmhwxi wrote:

[Hongwei Xi]

Yes, there is a lot of moving around.

Please take a look at the scripts to see how these utils can be built:

https://github.com/ats-lang/ats-lang.github.io/tree/master/SCRIPT

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