Agda is a dependently typed functional programming language that I like very much. Its latest versions have some special features which are not supported by any more well known languages, for example higher inductive types. Since I want to use all the special features of Agda, I regularly compile the latest version. This is a procedure which comes with a few surprises more often than not, so this post is about saving you the time it took me to figure out what to do.
I like to compile Agda using the Haskell tool Stack, which can be installed with
curl -sSL https://get.haskellstack.org/ | sh
The sources of Agda have to be checked out with all submodules – otherwise there will be some weird “cabal” (another Haskell tool, more basic than Stack) errors which I was not able to understand. This can be done with:
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/agda/agda.git
Now if you go to the Agda folder
cd agda
There should be files called “stack-8.8.4.yaml” and similar. Those files can can tell Stack how to build Agda. The number is the version of the Haskell compiler which is used to build Agda. I usually use the latest, you do not have to figure out which (if any) is installed on your system, since Stack will just download the appropriate compiler for you.
However, just running stack failed for my on Fedora 32 due to some linking problem in the end. It turned out, that “libtinfo.so” was not found by the linker. “libtinfo.so.6” is available on Fedora 32, so adding a link to it fixed the problem:
sudo ln -s /usr/lib64/libtinfo.so.6 /usr/lib64/libtinfo.so
Now, you can tell Stack to get all necessary things and compile and install Agda with:
stack install --stack-yaml stack-8.8.4.yaml
This also installs a binary into “~/.local/bin” which is in PATH on Fedora 32 by default, so you should be able to call agda from the command line. Also, you can use “agda-mode” to configure emacs for agda.
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