Alaska

A compiler and runtime framework for handle based memory management.

Releases + Development

This project is under active development, and APIs are still in flux. If you would like to get the version used in our ASPLOS'24 Paper, you can access it through the tagged release.

Otherwise, this project uses main as a pseudo "stable" branch (for some definition of that word). The dev branch is where most of the development is based. main is protected and cannot be pushed to without a PR.

Building

Alaska requires two main dependencies: clang, llvm 16 and gclang. We provide both a nix flake, and tools to download these dependencies for you, but if you already have them in your path you don't need to worry. You can test this by simply running make, and you may get this output:

...
-- Detecting CXX compile features
-- Detecting CXX compile features - done
CMake Error at CMakeLists.txt:36 (find_package):
  Could not find a configuration file for package "LLVM" that is compatible
  with requested version "16".

  The following configuration files were considered but not accepted:

    /usr/lib/llvm-14/cmake/LLVMConfig.cmake, version: 14.0.0
    /lib/llvm-14/cmake/LLVMConfig.cmake, version: 14.0.0

...

If this is the case, CMake was unable to find clang 16 in your environment, and you should use one of the following steps.

Dependencies with nix

We prefer to manage Alaska's dependencies through nix if you have it installed. The main way to develop alaska with nix is to use flakes, and the following commands can be used to build alaska:

$ nix develop
# in the development shell, with with all the dependencies installed
$ make

Alternatively, you can run nix shell . to automatically compile alaska and include it in your shell.

Dependencies without nix

Alaska can manage it's own dependencies by simply running make deps. This will download and install a copy of clang-16, as well as a copy of gclang into ./local automatically. Once this is done, re-run make to compile alaska.

---

Using Alaska

Once built, local/bin/alaska functions as a drop-in replacement for clang. You can test alaska with the following commands:

local/bin/alaska -O3 test/sanity.c -o build/sanity && build/sanity

You can also run make sanity, which will do it for you.

Developing