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Command line (cli) controller

Extends Moddable to be able to provide command line program using the cli-<platform> platform type, including cli-win for Windows, cli-mac for Mac, and cli-lin for Linux. Includes support host/mod loading, timers, promises and workers.

Running your program

When you build, such as mcconfig -m -d -p cli-win, the resulting program will be a native app (such as .exe on windows, or .app on mac). If you run that program with no command line arguments, the default exported main function will be called. The code will continue to operate, including support for Timer and other async services. If you need to terminate the app under control of the program, use:

function abort(status) @ "fxAbort";

fxAbort(status);    // status is the exit code the program will terminate with

Using mods

It you specify a path to a mod file (.xsa file, built with mcrun) as the first argument to the program, it will be loaded and symbols resolved before the main exported function is called. This is slightly different than how the microcontrollers consume mods (from the flash xs partition, upon reboot) or how the simulators consume mods (provided via the mcrun program while a host waits for the module to be presented), but the resulting functionality remains the same.

Using the debugger and instrumentation

Full support for the debugger and instrumentation is included, and it should behave the same as using other platform types. Instrumentation is updated once per second.

Linux requires X Windows System

The Moddable implementation for Linux depends on the GTK3+ libraries, and as such even though a console application is built using cli, it still depends on X being installed. This means that running the Linux console application from telnet or ssh, or from a server-based (non-desktop) Linux distro will not work. You should be able to execute it by installing X and also using the xvfb module (which implements a headless X frame buffer), but this has not been tested yet. If you try this and find a recipe that works, please submit a pull and update this documentation accordingly.

A great future project for someone is to consider implementing a generic console machine across all of Moddable using the libuv event handler, which is the event handler from Node. It is cross-platform and should allow for building command line programs on a wide range of platforms without the need for X or any window manager, assuming other cross-platform libraries are also consumed in the process for operations like files, resources, etc.