Project Setup

Not installed the C3 compiler yet?

Download C3, available on Mac, Windows and Linux.

Projects in C3¶

Projects are optional, but are a good way to manage compiling code when there are a lot of files and modules. They also allow you to specify libraries to link, and define how your project should be built for specific targets.

💡 Creating a new project¶

The c3c init command will create a new directory containing your project structure. It requires a name of the project, we will use myc3project in its place.

c3c init myc3project

You can also customize the path where the project will be created or specify a template. For more information check the init command reference.

📁 Project structure¶

If you check the directory that was created you might find it a bit confusing with a bunch of different directories, but worry not because if you expand them you will realise that most of them are actually empty!

.
├─ build/
├─ docs/
├─ lib/
├─ resources/
├─ scripts/
├─ src/
│  └─ main.c3
├─ test/
├─ LICENSE
├─ project.json
└─ README.md

Directory Overview¶

Directory	Usage
`./build`	Where your temporary files and build results will go.
`./docs`	Code Documentation
`./lib`	C3 libraries (with the .c3l suffix)
`./resources`	Non-code resources like images, sound effects etc.
`./scripts`	Scripts, including .c3 scripts that generate code at compile time.
`./src`	Storing our code, by default contains `main.c3` with "Hello World".
`project.json`	Record project information, similar to `package.json` in NodeJS.
`LICENSE`	Project license.
`README.md`	Help others understand and use your code.

🔧 Building the project¶

Assuming you have successfully initialized a project as seen above, we can now look at how to compile it.

🏃 Build & run¶

C3 has a simple command to build & run our project.

c3c run
> Program linked to executable 'build/myc3project'.
> Launching ./build/myc3project...
> Hello, World

You can also specify the target to build & run.

c3c run myc3project

🔧 Build¶

If you only want to build the project, you can use the build command:

c3c build

This command builds the project targets defined in our project.json file.

Note

If you want to build a specific target, you can do so by specifying its name. The default target is created with the name of the project, such as myc3project.

c3c build myc3project

We will now have a binary in build, which we can run:

./build/myc3project

It should print Hello, World! and return back to the command line prompt. If you are on Windows, you will have myc3project.exe instead. Call it in the same way.

If you need more detail later on check C3 project build commands and C3 project configuration to learn more.