Conditional compilation

While Inko code is portable across platforms and architectures, sometimes you need to handle differences in the underlying platforms, most commonly when using the FFI.

Inko supports conditional compilation at the import level only. This makes it easier to understand the code, as platform specific code ends up in dedicated modules.

For example, to import the module foo only on amd64 Linux platforms, you'd write the following:

import foo if linux and amd64

The tags act as an AND, meaning the import is only processed if all the specified tags are available. OR expressions and negations aren't supported, but OR expressions can be handled by just using separate imports:

import foo if linux
import foo if mac

If a conditionally compiled module includes any errors (e.g. a type error), those errors won't surface until you compile the code such that the module is imported based on the available and required build tags. This means that if you have an import foo if mac statement, and the foo module contains any errors, you won't see those errors until you compile your code for/on macOS.

The compiler won't produce any errors for tags it doesn't recognise, meaning the following import is never processed:

import foo if kittens

Available build tags

The following tags are available:

The bag bsd is essentially (freebsd OR ...), while unix is essentially (freebsd or linux or mac or ...).

For Linux targets using glibc, the ABI is gnu instead of native. For the time being the ABI tags aren't useful, but in the future we may support both musl and GNU builds, at which point they can be useful to handle differences between the two libc implementations.