How to get FsYacc and FsLex (FsLexYacc) on OS X

InstallingFsYaccFsLexOSX.md

Installing FsYacc and FsLex (FsLexYacc) on OS X

Step by step guide to getting FsYacc and FsLex for development on OS X.

Changes

• 2017-01-09: Updated guide to reflect latest version of FsLexYacc (7.0.3)
• 2016: Created

1. Install Mono

By doing one of these:

• Recommended¹: Via mono-project.com
• With homebrew (in the terminal): brew install mono

2. Get NuGet Package Manager (CLI)

Download nuget.exe to ~/fsharp.

3. Install FsLexYacc

Copy paste into a terminal:

cd ~/fsharp                      # move to the ~/fsharp directory
mono nuget.exe install FsLexYacc # install fslexyacc with nuget
ls                               # list which files are in the current directory

# Should output something like:
# FsLexYacc.7.0.3/  FsLexYacc.Runtime.7.0.3/ FSharp.Core.3.1.2.5/ nuget.exe

4. Create links to FsLex and FsYacc binaries

Copy paste into a terminal:

cd /usr/local/bin
echo -e '#!/bin/bash\nmono /Users/'$USER'/fsharp/FsLexYacc.7.0.3/build/fslex.exe $*' > fslex
echo -e '#!/bin/bash\nmono /Users/'$USER'/fsharp/FsLexYacc.7.0.3/build/fsyacc.exe $*' > fsyacc
chmod a+x fslex fsyacc

5. Link the runtime DLL to your ~/fsharp folder

The FsLexYacc.Runtime.dll file needs to be referred to when lexing and compiling your language,

# link the Runtime to your ~/fsharp folder (once):
ln -s "~/fsharp/FsLexYacc.Runtime.7.0.3/lib/portable-net45+netcore45+wpa81+wp8+MonoAndroid10+MonoTouch10/FsLexYacc.Runtime.dll" ~/fsharp

# then henceforth, you can use the following from your project directory
# (referring to the link you just made):
fsharpi -r ~/fsharp/FsLexYacc.Runtime.dll Absyn.fs FunPar.fs FunLex.fs Parse.fs

5. Profit!

You should now totally have FsLexYacc on your OS X computer, ready to create awesome languages and compilers!

Footnotes

1. When building from Homebrew, the Mono runtime gets odd parameters which sets tail-call optimizations to disabled for some reason, avoid this by using the downloadable installer from mono-project.