If you run into problems with the one-line build commands listed in the
README.md
, or if just want to understand how Extempore's build process works
in more depth, here's some more information.
- a C++ compiler (
clang
,gcc
>= 4.9,msvc
>= VS2015) - Git
- CMake >= 3.19
- Python >= 2.7 (for LLVM)
For platform-specific deps, see "Platform-specific notes" below.
See the top of CMakeLists.txt
for all the available build options.
The most relevant option for new Extempore users is the ASSETS
option. It's
off by default, but if set to ON
the Extempore build process will download a
bunch of assets (e.g. sound files, 3D model files) which are necessary to run
many of the Extempore examples. These asset files live in a separate
repo.
This option is off by default because it's a pretty big (~300MB) download. If
you don't set -DASSETS=ON
at build time that's ok---CMake will still create an
assets
target which you can "build" afterwards to downoad the assets and move
them into place.
The default target will build Extempore, all the dependencies, and AOT-compile the standard library (for faster startup). However, in other situations the following targets might come in handy:
-
on macOS and Linux, the
install
target will move the extempore executable to/usr/local/bin
(or similar) and the rest of the Extempore share directory to/usr/local/share/extempore
(does nothing on Windows) -
the
aot
target will ahead-of-time compile just the core standard library, i.e. the pure-xtlang libraries with no external C library dependencies -
the
clean_aot
target will remove all AOT-compiled files
On macOS 10.14 Apple removed some of the system OpenGL headers, which means that some of Extempore's dependencies (e.g. nanovg) won't build. This blog post has more details, but if you just want a one-liner to fix it, it's
sudo installer -pkg /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/Packages/macOS_SDK_headers_for_macOS_10.14.pkg -target /
Since macOS 10.15 Apple requires all binaries to be signed & notarized, and the
Extempore core team (Andy & Ben) haven't yet got an Apple Developer account set
up to do that (it's on the to-do list). So if you have problems with the macOS
Gatekeeper saying that it doesn't trust the extempore
binary then reach out on
the mailing list---there's a workaround
which isn't ideal (disabling the "is this binary legit?" check) but we can keep
you up-to-date on the best way to deal with the issue.
Extempore is built & tested on Ubuntu, but is also known to work with Debian, Fedora, Arch, NixOS, and inside a docker container.
On Linux, you'll need to specify an ALSA backend
for portaudio. To use the asound
portaudio backend (the default) you'll need
the libasound
package. Extempore also includes a legacy
Jack portaudio backend, but it has bitrotted in
recent years. PortAudio should pick it up if it's there, but you might have to
do some spelunking.
On Ubuntu 18.04-20.04 you can get the required deps with:
sudo apt-get install libasound2-dev xorg-dev libglu1-mesa-dev
There's an AUR package
Extempore is built & tested on Windows 10 with Visual Studio 2017 and Visual Studio 2019. If you don't already have VS installed, you can download the free Visual Studio Community---that's perfectly fine for building Extempore (although the paid versions of VS will work as well).
In the CMake build process, you'll need to specify which version you're using---confusingly the Visual Studio version numbers and years don't quite line up, so the respective generators are:
- VS2017: "-G "Visual Studio 15 2017" -A x64"
- VS2019: "-G "Visual Studio 16 2019" -A x64"
If you ever see the error message VCRUNTIME140_1.dll was not found, then
you'll need to download the x64 vc_redist.x64.exe
. Make sure you get it from
the official Windows
website,
because there are lots of sketchy places on the web which will try and get you
to download theirs instead.
If you want to use the ASIO audio backend on Windows (which might give you
lower-latency audio, or it might not) you need to download the ASIO
SDK
from Steinberg. You have to create a third party developer
account,
then you can log in and download the ASIO SDK (make sure you get the right SDK).
You also need to download and install ASIO4ALL with
the 'offline setup panel' option enabled. After that, copy the ASIO files into
the src/portaudio/src/hostapi/asio
.