Introduction

The FastR codebase is structured around IDE projects, which are contained in directories beginning with com.oracle.truffle.r. The expectation is that source code will be viewed and edited in an IDE (we will use Eclipse as the example) and the mx tool has support for automatically generating the IDE project metadata via the ideinit command. N.B. if you run this before you have built the system with mx build do not be surprised that it will compile some Java classes. It does this to gather information about Java annotation processors that is necessary for correct rebuilding within the IDE.

The majority of the projects are "Java" projects, but any project with native in its name contains native code, e.g. C code, and is (ultimately) built using make. mx handles this transparently and invokes the Makefiles during mx build. Moreover, mx exports some environment variables that are may be used by those Makefiles, therefore invoking the Makefiles manually may no work correctly.