1 Running Programs

Suppose we have a felix program hello.flx:

  println$ "Hello World";

which we expect to print

Hello World

To run this program we just type

flx hello.flx

That's it. Behind the scenes, it is translated to C++, compiled, linked, and executed.

1.1 Performance

The first time, it will take around 5 seconds.

1.2 Dependency Checking

However, if you do it again, it's much faster. That's because, if the program binary is up to date, Felix just runs it.

~/felix>time flx  hello
Hello

real	0m0.581s
user	0m0.476s
sys	0m0.086s

1.3 Caching

You may wonder where the binary is. Indeed, you may wonder where the generated C++ is. If you look at the directory containing the hello.flx file, you will not see these files.

These files are considered temporaries, and are stored in a cache, usually in $HOME/.felix/cache somewhere.

1.4 Binaries

That isn't the end of it, though. Most scripting languages make it insanely difficult to generate a portable binary. Just take a look at projects such as py2exe, PyInstaller, OCRA, srlua, and many more similar projects. However, Felix makes it easy. Just run:

flx -c --static -o hello hello.flx

You should now have a working hello binary! This combination of being able use Felix like a scripting language and then generate portable binaries for distribution is very powerful.