Installation Guide

Java JDK, version 1.8, Apache Ant, Git and wget. For Ubuntu users:

apt-get install default-jdk ant git wget

For macOS, using Homebrew (install a JDK separately):

brew install coreutils ant wget

To clone from GitHub, wherever you wish to checkout the repository, run:

$ git clone https://github.com/melt-umn/silver.git
$ cd silver
silver$ ./update

This will pull the latest changes, and update your working copy. It will also download the latest jars (which may be necessary! Silver is written in Silver, so there can be bootstrapping issues) and clear out any generated files, which may now be stale with the new version.

Alternatively, the latest stable release can be found on the Downloads page.

Here is an example session, running the hello world tutorial grammar:

silver$ cd tutorials/hello
silver/tutorials/hello$ ./silver-compile
 -- SNIPPED --
silver/tutorials/hello$ java -jar hello.jar
Hello, World!

If you have any issues, first try the frequently asked question page to see if there are any questions like yours.

silver$ ./support/bin/install-silver-bin

Note that this assumes you have a ~/bin. In most distributions, if you don’t have a ~/bin, all you have to do is mkdir ~/bin, and the default shell scripts will notice it and add it to your PATH next time your shell is started.

At this point, Silver should be all set. You can test it with: (continuing from above)

silver$ cd tutorials
silver/tutorials$ silver hello
 -- SNIPPED --
silver/tutorials$ java -jar hello.jar
Hello World!

Note that this differs from the previous example session by using the ‘silver’ script in ~/bin instead of the local silver-compile script, and it is run from the tutorials directory instead of tutorials/hello.

See here.