Installing Polarity

We currently do not provide prebuilt binaries, so you have to build the polarity executable from the sources yourself.

Requirements

The latest version of the source code is available on github.com/polarity-lang/polarity. You have to clone that repository into an empty directory, for example with the following invocation:

> git clone git@github.com:polarity-lang/polarity.git

Polarity is implemented in Rust, so you also need to install a Rust toolchain on your system. The recommended way to install Rust is to use the rustup toolchain manager and to follow the instructions on their website.

Building from Source

In order to build the binary you can use the provided Makefile:

> make install

By default, this should install the executable pol in the directory ~/.cargo/bin/. Make sure that this directory is in your PATH. You can check whether the installation was successful by trying to use the help option of the command line interface:

> pol --help
Usage: pol [OPTIONS] <COMMAND>

Commands:
  run     Run a source code file
  fmt     Format a code file
  texify  Render a code file as a latex document
  xfunc   De-/Refunctionalize a type in a code file
  lsp     Start an LSP server
  lift    Lift local (co)matches of a type to the top-level
  help    Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)

Options:
      --trace  Enable internal debug output
  -h, --help   Print help

The pol binary is also used to provide editor support using the language server protocol (LSP), so make sure that the installation was successful before proceeding with the installation of the editor plugin.

Editor Support

Visual Studio Code

We offer a plugin for Visual Studio Code which provides rich editor services via the language server protocol (LSP). The plugin is available on the Visual Studio Marketplace and can be found by searching for polarity in the extensions browser of Visual Studio Code.

VSCodium

Users of VSCodium or other editors compatible with .vsix plugins can install the extension from the open-vsx marketplace instead.

Building from source

The plugin can also be built from source using the instructions on github.com/polarity-lang/vscode.

Shell Completions

In order to get working shell completions for the pol binary you need to generate a completion script for your shell and place it in the correct directory. This directory depends on your operating system, distribution and shell. Completions scripts can be generated with the pol generate-completion subcommand which supports Bash, Elvish, fish, PowerShell and the Zsh shell.

If you are using the bash shell on Ubuntu, for example, you can install a completion script using the following steps:

> pol generate-completion bash pol
> sudo mv pol /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/pol

Please consult the documentation of your operating system or distribution to find out where you have to place the completion scripts on your computer.