$ cd /usr/local/bin
$ wget https://waf.io/waf-2.0.x
$ ln -s waf-2.0.x waf
$ chmod +x waf-2.0.x
$ ./waf

Poetry is used to install Python dependencies used on compilation (Cython), and in tests. To install Poetry, follow the instructions on the official documentation: https://python-poetry.org/docs/#osx—​linux—​bashonwindows-install-instructions

$ waf configure

$ CC=clang CXX=clang++ waf configure

$ waf
or
$ waf build

$ waf list

$ waf --targets=target1,target2

Other commands are listed with waf --help. Here they are:

• waf check: run the tests of the current directory (defined in the ZFile) and in its sub-directories. The following variants also exist (cf waf --help for the details): fast-check, www-check, selenium, fast-selenium.

• waf tags: generate tags using ctags.

• waf etags: generate tags for emacs using ctags.

• waf pylint: run pylint checks on committed python files.

• old-gen-files-detect: detect old files generated by a previous build system run.

• old-gen-files-delete: delete the files detected by the previous command.

• coverage-start: start a coverage session (requires coverage profile). This resets the coverage counters. After running this command, you can run some code and use the coverage-end command to produce a coverage report. Note that this is done when configuring the project.

• coverage-end: end a coverage session and produce a report.

The following environment variables can be used at the configuration phase:

P (string)

Specify the desired compilation profile (default, debug, release, …​). The complete list of available profiles is defined in build/waftools/backend.py, variable PROFILES. If not specified, the default profile is default.

NOCHECK (boolean)

The build-system doesn’t run "check" targets, which are:

• clang check of c files.

• linters on js/ts files. You may want to set it to speedup the build. You can also bypass the checks thanks to the nocheck parameter of task-generators, which can be True to bypass the checks of all the source files, or a list of files to not check.

NOASSERT (boolean)

If set, the assertions and debug-related code won’t be compiled. By default, assertions are disabled in release and mem-bench profiles, and enabled in all the others.

NO_DOUBLE_FPIC (boolean)

If set, the compilation will be faster, but the produced binaries will be larger and the runtime performances will be affected. Cf. build/waftools/backend.py for the details. This is ignored in release profile.

FAKE_VERSIONS (boolean)

If set, the version files are generated with fake (and constant) data, so that changing of git revision does not trigger a re-link of all the binaries. This is a huge gain of time, but it’s not possible to know the revision of the binaries that are built with this flag. This is ignored in release profile.

SHARED_LIBRARY_SANITIZER (boolean)

If set, the shared libraries will also be compiled with the sanitizer specified by the profile. You will have to use LD_PRELOAD or use a process that is compiled with the same sanitizer to load the compiled shared libraries with this option. This is only available for profiles that use sanitizers, i.e. asan or tsan.

An important part of the lib-common uses the blocks clang extension, that is not supported by gcc.

Because of this, we have put in place a two-phase build of some files (named foo.blk instead of foo.c) that are pre-compiled using a special tool named clang-rewrite-blocks. gcc is then used to produce the final object code.

clang-rewrite-blocks is compiled and used automatically by the build-system. See src/`clang-rewrite-blocks/README.adoc` for more information about clang-rewrite-blocks.