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Introduction

Here's how to write your very first fox program in six steps on either Ubuntu 18.04 or Windows 10. In general, you first write your .fox source files and compile them to get .s files, containing assembly instructions. Those go into the assembler, which generates machine code and writes that to .o (Linux) or .obj (Windows) files. Then the linker combines these into an executable with no (Linux) or .exe (Windows) extension. Note that both the assembler and linker step is done in one command on Linux and Windows.

On Linux

  1. Verify that you have gcc installed. We need gcc for its assembler and linker. I use gcc 7.5 but other versions may also work just fine. No guarantees though.
$ gcc --version
gcc (Ubuntu 7.5.0-3ubuntu1~18.04) 7.5.0

  1. Download the latest Linux release of the fox compiler foxy from the releases page and place it in a folder of your choice. Let's say you picked ~/fox-dev for example. You can also choose to just build foxy yourself by cloning this repository and running make in the /foxy subdirectory.

  2. Now we are ready to create the minimal fox program life. As the name implies, it's very powerful and returns the number 42. And it does all that in just one single source file called life.fox. Fist we navigate to ~/fox-dev and then we write the source file.

$ cd ~/fox-dev
$ echo "# hello fox" > life.fox
$ echo "var x" >> life.fox
$ echo "x 42" >> life.fox
$ echo "return x" >> life.fox
  1. Let's compile life. We simply supply our platform with -platform linux-gcc and a list of source files to the compiler.
$ ./foxy -platform linux-gcc life.fox
life.fox
life.fox -> life.s
  1. Now assemble and link the fox program with a little help from our friend gcc.
$ gcc life.s -o life
  1. Run life and print the previous program's return code with echo $?. Verify that the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything, is indeed 42.
$ ./life
$ echo $?
42

On Windows

  1. Install Visual Studio if you don't have it yet. We need it for its assembler and linker. I use Visual Studio Community 2019 but 2017 should be compatible as well.

  2. Grab the latest Windows release of the fox compiler foxy from the releases page and extract it to a folder of your choice. Let's use the folder C:\fox-dev for example.

  3. Time to create our first fox program. It will be called life and consists of just a single source file: life.fox. It's very complex and returns the number 42. First, you need to open the x64 Native Tools Command Prompt for Visual Studio 2019. It's easy to find if you open your start menu and begin typing in the first letters. Then enter the following commands in the prompt that pops up to navigate to our folder C:\fox-dev and write the source file life.fox:

> cd c:\fox-dev
> echo # hello fox > life.fox
> echo var x >> life.fox
> echo x 42 >> life.fox
> echo return x >> life.fox
  1. Now it's time to compile life. We simply supply our platform with -platform win-vs and a list of source files to foxy:
> foxy -platform win-vs life.fox
life.fox
life.fox -> life.s
  1. Next we need to assemble and link the fox program. We will use the Microsoft Macro Assembler and Microsoft Incremental Linker tools that come with Visual Studio for this.
> ml64 life.s /link /ENTRY:main
  1. Let's run life and then check that it returned 42 by printing %errorlevel%. Make sure that our program did indeed return the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.
> life
> echo %errorlevel%
42