cli tutorial

This tutorial shows how to build the floating-conformance executable and run the four conformance runners through it, either directly or through the just conformance tooling that downloads and plans whole corpora.

Quick start

The executable is native-only. From the repository root, build it and print the usage line:

sh tools/run_moon_clean_exec.sh run --release --target native src/cli -- --help

usage: floating-conformance --backend <gda|testfloat|mpfr|itl> [backend options]

Run the committed GDA smoke file (the default path of the gda runner):

sh tools/run_moon_clean_exec.sh run --release --target native src/cli -- --backend gda

The runner prints a summary and the process exits with 0 when every executable row passed.

Everyday tasks

Choose a backend

Everything after the dispatcher’s own options goes to the runner:

floating-conformance --backend gda --json testdata/decimal/smoke.decTest
floating-conformance --backend itl testdata/interval/smoke.itl
floating-conformance --backend mpfr --json testdata/bin_float/mpfr-4.2.2-elementary.txt
floating-conformance --backend testfloat --function f64_mul --rounding rnear_even vectors.tv

(floating-conformance stands for the built executable, for example _build/conformance/gda/native/release/build/gda-conformance.exe.)

Use the tooling instead of raw invocations

For full corpora, let tools/conformance.py build the executable, fetch the pinned data, plan the phases and run the shards in parallel:

just conformance build decimal_gda
just conformance smoke binary
just conformance run interval
just gate decimal_gda 8

Read the exit code

0 means success, 1 means failing cases (or unsupported cases in strict mode), 2 means a usage, file or parse error. Scripts should check the code and, with --json, parse the single JSON object on standard output.

Going further

• Each runner has its own options; see the tutorials for gda_expr_cli, itl_expr_cli, mpfr_expr_cli and testfloat_expr_cli.
• To execute corpora in MoonBit code without a process, call the frontends directly, for example gda_expr.

Common pitfalls

• --help is the dispatcher’s. --backend gda --help prints the dispatcher usage and exits with 0; it does not show the runner’s options.
• Relative default paths. Runners default to files under testdata/; run them from the repository root.
• One backend per invocation. --backend may be given only once.

Next steps

• cli API for the exact options and exit codes.
• cli design for the layering.
• verification for the published corpus claims.