65 lines
2.0 KiB
Markdown
65 lines
2.0 KiB
Markdown
---
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layout: post
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title: "Elm on FreeBSD"
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date: 2019-05-11
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comments: true
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tags: freebsd, elm, linux
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---
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[Elm](https://elm-lang.org/) is a purely functional, strongly typed language for
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building web-apps. I recently started playing with elm[^1] and so far love it!
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There was a small bit of trouble though, Elm doesnt officially support
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FreeBSD. The compiler is written in Haskell and
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[couple](https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/running-elm-on-freebsd/1613)
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of
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[people](https://gist.github.com/vyuh/ff05a20cb0f408e1fd0ac8c23d06025b)
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have made it work on freebsd by compiling from source.
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That's where I started, and soon gave up because compiling `elm 0.19`
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needs `ghc-8.2.2`. That particular ghc version is no longer in binary
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packages. Stack ghcs are still [broken on
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FreeBSD](https://blog.dbalan.in/blog/2019/01/08/recurse-center-day-%23-2/index.html)
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to try that route. All of the solutions I encountered builds ghc from
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source and that was going take an eternity on my thinkpad.
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Luckily elm project provides binaries for Linux - and FreeBSD
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[can pretend to be
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linux](https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/linuxemu.html) pretty
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well. Thats what I ended up doing!
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1. Load the kernel module for linux emulation.
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```
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kldload linux64.ko
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```
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2. Get elm [linux binary from github](https://github.com/elm/compiler/releases).
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```
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wget \
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https://github.com/elm/compiler/releases/download/0.19.0/binaries-for-linux.tar.gz
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tar xf binaries-for-linux.tar.gz
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```
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3. Then [brand the ELF
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binary](https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=brandelf&sektion=1&manpath=freebsd-release-ports)
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as type `Linux`. Kernel uses this information check decide runtime
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to use, in our case Linux emulation.
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```
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brandelf -t Linux ./elm
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```
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..and there we have it
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```
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$ file elm
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elm: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (GNU/Linux), statically linked, with debug_info, not stripped
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$ ./elm
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Hi, thank you for trying out Elm 0.19.0. I hope you like it!
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...
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```
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[^1]: Shout-out to Tenor and Liz for introducing me to Elm.
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