As Volt is written in D a compiler for D is needed, GDC, LDC and DMD should be able to compile Votl. Once Volt is capable enough the compiler will be ported to Volt and achive self-hosting that way.
Volt uses LLVM as backend to generate binary code. Currently version 3.1 is used, version 3.0 might work, 2.9 will not as it is missing some interfaces.
For Linux's with GDC packaged (like Ubuntu) it is the recommended compiler. To get GDC and LLVM on Ubuntu do this:
$ sudo apt-get install gdc llvm
For DMD known working are DMD 2.060 and above. To setup DMD just follow the Mac instructions.
There are no packages of GDC for Mac so DMD should be used. To install it just excract the contents of dmd.2.<version>.zip <somewhere> and set the DMD enviromental variable to be "<somewhere>/osx/bin/dmd" or put the folder "<somewhere>/osx/bin" on the path.
Download llvm from the llvm homepage, and put the bin folder inside the unpacked tarball on the PATH, the builds system needs llvm-config and the compiler requires some helpers from there to link.
For other platforms you need probably need to compile it you can get the latest version from here https://bitbucket.org/goshawk/gdc/wiki/Home Cross compiling on Linux to Windows is confirmed working.
Now you just need to build the compiler, to do so type:
$ make
$ make run
Please feel free to contribute. Contributing is easy! Just send us your code. Diffs are appreciated, in git format; Github pull requests are excellent. The worst thing that can happen is that we will ignore you.
Things to consider:
- The parser, runtime and standard library is under the BOOST license. Your contributions to any of these parts will be under that same license. If this isn't acceptable, then your code cannot be merged. This is really the only hard condition.
- That was short wasn't it? Just remmeber don't be a dick, have fun and there will be cake! That is all!