Getting Started

Prerequisite: You need Mercurial

On most systems you can use your favorite package manager to install Mercurial.
On Ubuntu it's simply called "mercurial".

For MS-Windows you can download from this web page.

Prerequisite: You need a compiler and development environment

Depending on your system this may already be there or you need to install.
For Ubuntu you would need packages gcc and libc6-dev.

For MS-Windows you need to install MingW, see this web page.
You don't need MSYS.

For threading support (including the HTTP server), you need a pthreads library.
You can download one from here.

Build for the first time

Use this command to fetch the Zimbu files:
hg clone https://zimbu.googlecode.com/hg/ zimbu
cd zimbu

On Unix building is done with "make bootstrap".  You can verify it works with "make test":
make bootstrap
make test

On MS-Windows use these commands:
make -f makeming.mak bootstrap
make -f makeming.mak test

Updating to the latest version

On Unix:
make update

On MS-Windows:
make -f makeming.mak update

This will use Mercurial to fetch the latest files ("hg pull"), update the working directory ("hg update -C") and build from the C files ("make bootstrap").

Try out your code

A fun way to try out Zimbu code is by a live edit-build-run demo.  Do this:

cd livedemo
make
./livedemo

Now point your browser to http://localhost:8889/index.html
You will be able to type Zimbu code and immediately see the result.
Either error messages from the compiler or, when compilation succeeded, the output of the program.

This is what it looks like:

And when you make an error:

The live demo was written in Zimbu, using the ZWT library (Zimbu Web Toolkit).

Subpages (1): Hello world