The Poac Book

Creating a new project

Use this command when you start a new poac project.

$ poac create hello_world
     Created binary (application) `hello_world` package

If you want to integrate your existing project with Poac, use the init command:

your-pj/$ poac init
     Created binary (application) `your-pj` package

This command just creates a poac.toml file not to let your project break.

Install dependencies

Like Cargo for Rust does, Poac installs dependencies at build time. However, Poac does not support weired specifiers for versions, such as ~ and ^. You can specify dependencies like:

poac.toml

[dependencies]
"boost/bind" = ">=1.64.0 and <2.0.0"

We regularly avoid auto updating packages to major versions which bring breaking changes, but minor and patch are acceptable.

If you would use a specific version, you can write the version as following:

[dependencies]
"boost/bind" = "1.66.0"

After editing poac.toml, executing the build command will install the package and its dependencies.

hello_world/$ poac build
 Downloading packages ...
  Downloaded boost/bind v1.66.0
  Downloaded boost/core v1.66.0
  Downloaded boost/assert v1.66.0
  Downloaded boost/config v1.66.0
   Compiling 1/1: hello_world v0.1.0 (/Users/ken-matsui/hello_world)
    Finished debug target(s) in 0.70s

To use this dependency, update the main.cpp file.

src/main.cpp

#include <iostream>
#include <boost/bind.hpp>
int f(int a, int b) {
  return a + b;
}
int main(int argc, char** argv) {
  std::cout << boost::bind(f, 5, _1)(10) << std::endl;
}

You can now run this source code:

hello_world/$ poac run
   Compiling 1/1: hello_world v0.1.0 (/Users/ken-matsui/hello_world)
    Finished debug target(s) in 0.50s
     Running `/Users/ken-matsui/hello_world/poac_output/debug/hello_world`
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We currently support building a project with header-only dependencies. Building with build-required dependencies will be soon supported.