Install

Preliminary Setup

Ensure you have the latest Node.js (> 8.0.0) and npm (> 5.0.0) installed on your system. If you have an older versions, you need to remove them. Here is the command to install Node.js version 13.x.

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_13.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

Fixing Permission Issues

If the NPM global install directory is not writable the install will fail with an EACCES error. NPM can be configured to use a folder inside of your home folder for global installs as follows:

mkdir ~/.npm-global
npm config set prefix '~/.npm-global'

You need to include the location of the binary files in your path to use the JAMScript compiler. Insert the following line in your ~/.profile file.

export PATH=~/.npm-global/bin:$PATH

You need to reload the ~/.profile using the following command afterwards.

source ~/.profile

Installing JAMScript

The JAMScript source is in a single repository. The tools and samples are inside the main repository under the tools/ and tests/ folders, respectively. To get the full source, run the following command from the folder where you want JAMScript downloaded.

git clone https://github.com/citelab/JAMScript

This should create a JAMScript folder. Go into that folder and execute the following command to do a local install. If you are going to study JAMScript, this is the best way to install it. You can change the source and modify various components of the compiler and language runtime.

npm run link

After successful installation, you should see the JAMScript compiler in your path: run which jamc to see it. The tests/ folder has many example files. You can compile them and run them.

Environment Setup

The current JAMScript runtime needs many file handlers to function. You need to set a high limit for the number of allowed file handles before running a JAMScript executable.

ulimit -n 3000