Origin

Getting Started

In order to use Origin, you will need GCC 6.0. This is currently in development and may need to be built from source.

Installing GCC

You will be installing GCC from source (see the complete instructions for more details). Note that there may be nightly releases that can be installed using your favorite package manager. Any build after August 2015 will suffice.

I recommend downloading the GCC source before trying to install the numerous prerequisites. Those can be installed using a script in the GCC source tree. After checking GCC out from SVN (or otherwise obtaining the source code), just run this:

cd $GCC_DIR
./contrib/download_prerequisites

It will download and install a number of prerequisites in the source directory to be compiled alongside GCC.

When configuring the source code, I strongly recommend specifying an alternative installation directory so that the custom install does not conflict with a system install. For example, I use the flag --prefix=$HOME/opt.

Building GCC can take a long time. To speed the process, you can use the --disable-bootstrap flag during configuration.

Installing Origin

There are, as of yet, no releases of Origin, so you must clone it from its GitHub repository. Note that Origin has only been tested on Linux and Mac OS X. It has not been ported to Windows.

Origin is configured using CMake. It can be built and installed using the following commands:

cd $ORIGIN_DIR
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

On Mac OS X, you may get a number of warnings about empty object files. While Origin is largely implemented in header files, every .hpp file has a corresponding .cpp file. These are often empty, and can result in warnings. They can be safely ignored.

Installing is straightforward.

make install

To specify a custom installation path, you can run:

cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=${ORIGIN_INSTALL_DIR}

where ${ORIGIN_INSTALL_DIR} is the installation root path. Or you can use ccmake to modify the build.

Header files will be installed in ${ORIGIN_INSTALL_DIR}/include, and the library binaries in ${ORIGIN_INSTALL_DIR}/lib.

Using Origin

The obligatory “Hello, world” program for Origin is:

// Definitions of common concepts
#include <origin/generic.hpp>

// Declares cout
#include <iostream>

template<origin::Output_streamable T>
void f(T const& t)
{
  std::cout << t << '\n';
}

int main()
{
  f("Hello, world");
}

In order to compile a program using the Origin libraries, you must use the -std=c++1z command-line option. This enables concepts within the compiler. If you installed Origin in a non-standard location, you will also need to add that information to the header and linker search paths.

${GCC} -std=c++1z -I {ORIGIN_INSTALL_DIR}/include -L {ORIGIN_INSTALL_DIR}/lib hello.cpp -lorigin

By default, Origin’s libraries are linked statically, so you should not need to update the dynamic linker’s search path.