Compiling in NixOS

Here are the instructions to build and run (in a very precarious way) Pharo on NixOS. The instructions probably also work for any Nix installation, but it has only been tested on NixOS.

Downloading the sources

The source files should not be directly downloaded from the git repository of Pharo, because they lack some generated artifacts required for bootstrapping. Instead, they should be downloaded here.

Since out-of-build sources is encouraged, we will assume that the directory containing the source code is located at <source-directory>, and that the current directory in what follows is the build directory.

Making the dependencies available

Write the following in flake.nix, in the build directory. This assumes that you have the experimental flakes feature enabled. Read the Nix wiki page for more information.

{
  inputs = {
    nixpkgs.url = github:nixos/nixpkgs/nixpkgs-unstable;
    utils.url = github:numtide/flake-utils;
  };

  outputs = { self, nixpkgs, utils }:
    utils.lib.eachDefaultSystem (system:
      let
        inherit (pkgs.stdenv) mkDerivation;
        pkgs = nixpkgs.legacyPackages.${system};
      in {
        devShell = pkgs.mkShell {
          shellHook = ''
            export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=${pkgs.SDL2}/lib:${pkgs.libgit2}/lib:`pwd`/build/vm
          '';
          packages = with pkgs; [
            cmake
            gcc
            gnumake
            openssl
            SDL2
            libffi
            libgit2
            libuuid
          ];
        };
      });
}

Build Pharo

Run the following commands, in the build directory

$ nix develop
$ cmake -B . -S <directory-sources> -DGENERATE_SOURCES_DIR=<directory-sources> -DGENERATE_SOURCES=OFF
$ cmake --build . --target install

If you have some errors about an image format not being recognised, it's not important, you can ignore that.

Using pharo

To launch Pharo with this setup, you still need to be in the development shell used to the build. To do so, go in the build directory (it's important to be at the root of the build directory), then run

$ nix develop

While in this shell, the VM can be invoked with pharo. You are not required to be in the build directory for this to work.