The Cairo Programming Language Book

Alexandria

This repository contains the source of "The Cairo Programming Language" book, a comprehensive documentation of the Cairo 1 programming language. This documentation is your go-to resource for mastering Cairo, created and maintained by the Starknet community. You can read the book online.

1. Rust related packages:

   • Install toolchain providing cargo using rustup.
   • Install mdBook and the translation extension:

   cargo install mdbook mdbook-i18n-helpers
   

2. Host machine packages:

   • Install gettext for translations, usually available with regular package manager: sudo apt install gettext.

3. Clone this repository.

All the Markdown files MUST be edited in english. To work locally in english:

• Start a local server with mdbook serve and visit localhost:3000 to view the book. You can use the --open flag to open the browser automatically: mdbook serve --open.

• Make changes to the book and refresh the browser to see the changes.

• Open a PR with your changes.

This book is targetting international audience, and aims at being gradually translated in several languages.

All files in the src directory MUST be written in english. This ensures that all the translation files can be auto-generated and updated by translators.

To work with translations, those are the steps to update the translated content:

• Run a local server for the language you want to edit: ./translations.sh es for instance. If no language is provided, the script will only extract translations from english.

• Open the translation file you are interested in po/es.po for instance. You can also use editors like poedit to help you on this task.

• When you are done, you should only have changes into the po/xx.po file. Commit them and open a PR. The PR must stars with i18n to let the maintainers know that the PR is only changing translation.

The translation work is inspired from Comprehensive Rust repository.

The current book has a mdbook backend to extract Cairo programs from the markdown sources. To run this locally, and test if a Cairo program you have written in the book actually compiled.

The mdbook-cairo backend is working as following:

1. It takes every code blocks in the markdown source and parse all of them.

2. Code blocks with a main function fn main() are extracted into Cairo programs.

3. The extracted programs are nammed based on the chapter they belong to, and a consecutive number of the fn main() found in the chapter.

4. If you have a code block with a fn main() function, but you know that is does not compile, you can add an attribute to the code block tag value as following:

   ```rust,does_not_compile
   fn main() {
   }
   ```
   

   This main function will still count in the consecutive number of fn main() in the chapter file, but will not be extracted into a Cairo program.

To run the CI locally, ensure that you are at the root of the repository (same directoy of this README.md file), and run:

bash mdbook-cairo/scripts/cairo_local_verify.sh