Building projects with SBT

If you have reached this section you probably have a system that is now able to compile and run Scala Native programs.

Minimal sbt project

Start within a new folder, and create a file project/plugins.sbt as follows:

addSbtPlugin("org.scala-native" % "sbt-scala-native"  % "0.1.0")

Create a file project/build.properties to define the sbt version as follows:

sbt.version = 0.13.13

define a new build.sbt:

enablePlugins(ScalaNativePlugin)

scalaVersion := "2.11.8"

and now you can write your first application in ./src/main/scala/HelloWorld.scala:

package example

object Main {
  def main(args: Array[String]): Unit =
    println("Hello, world!")
}

now simply run sbt run to get everything compiled and have the expected output!

Sbt settings

Name	Type	Description
nativeClang	File	Path to clang command
nativeClangPP	File	Path to clang++ command
nativeCompileOptions	Seq[String]	Extra options passed to clang verbatim
nativeMode	String	Either "debug" or "release" (1)

See Compilation modes for details.

Sbt tasks

Name	Description
compile	Compile Scala code to NIR
nativeLink	Link NIR and generate native binary
run	Compile, link and run the generated binary
package	Similar to standard package with addition of NIR
publish	Similar to standard publish with addition of NIR (1)

See Publishing for details.

Compilation modes

Scala Native supports two distinct linking modes:

1. debug.

   Default mode. Optimized for shortest compilation time. Runs fewer optimizations and is much more suited for iterative development workflow. Similar to clang’s -O0.

2. release.

   Optimized for best runtime performance at expense of longer compilation time. Similar to clang’s -O2 with addition of link-time optimisation over the whole application code.

Publishing

Scala Native supports sbt’s standard workflow for the package distribution:

1. Compile your code.
2. Generate a jar with all of the classfiles and NIR files.
3. Publish the jar to sonatype, bintray or any other 3rd party hosting service.

Once the jar has been published, it can be resolved through sbt’s standard package resolution system.

Cross compilation between JS, JVM and Native

We created sbt-crossproject to be a drop-in replacement of Scala.js’ crossProject. Please refer to its documentation in the README.

Continue to Language semantics.