Acton Projects

Besides compiling individual .act files, it is possible to organize Acton code into an Acton Project, which is suitable once you have more than one .act source code file.

Use acton to create a new project called foo:

acton new foo

Output:

Created project foo
Enter your new project directory with:
  cd foo
Compile:
  acton build
Run:
  ./out/bin/foo

Description

Use acton build to build a project. The current working directory must be the project directory or a sub-directory to the project directory. acton will discover all source files and compile them according to dependency order.

Add a main actor to any source file directly under src/ to produce an executable binary. For example, if src/hello.act contains a main actor, it will produce out/bin/hello using main as the root actor.

Build configuration and lineage

Projects must include a Build.act file. Two common fields are name and fingerprint, where the fingerprint captures the project’s lineage:

name = "hello"
fingerprint = 0x1234abcd5678ef00

name and fingerprint are required for Acton projects. Acton validates that the fingerprint matches the name’s lineage prefix. A mismatch indicates a rename or a fork, so the build fails and tells you to generate a new fingerprint for the new name. If either field is missing, the build fails with guidance to add it.