Usage and Project Structure

ByteC can be installed by cloning this repository and then running cargo install --path . (you'll need Rust installed to use cargo); make sure you have cargo's output directory on your PATH (this is ~/.cargo/bin on Linux). After that, you can use the bytec command to run the compiler.

The project structure for a ByteC-based Battlecode bot should look something like this (see an example Battlecode 2022 bot here):

• battlecode22 - the Git repository for this year's bots, a clone of battlecode22-scaffold
  • bytec - this is the directory that all ByteC source files go in; it would be called src, but that must be the output directory because it's hardcoded into the Battlecode engine.
    • common - modules in here will be shared between all bots.
      • Common.bt
      • Paths.bt
    • bot_one
      • RobotPlayer.bt
      • Soldier.bt
    • bot_two
      • RobotPlayer.bt
      • Miner.bt
  • src - output Java files must go in this directory to be seen by the Battlecode client. This is probably in .gitignore so you don't commit these files every time.
    • ...
  • ...

Then, the CLI syntax for bytec looks like bytec source-path dest-path, so here it would be (note that files in bot_one can still use files in common, even though it's not in the command-line arguments):

bytec bytec/bot_one src/bot_one

This is intended to make it easy to test against alternate versions of your bot - simply compile to a certain output package (the names don't need to match, bytec will insert the necessary package declarations), make a change, and then compile it again to a different output package and run them against each other. The ability to override constants from the command line (-CModule::SOME_CONST=12, along the lines of C's -DSOME_CONST=12) also helps with that, especially with scripts that might test many possible parameters automatically.

VSCode extension

There's a VSCode extension for ByteC with syntax highlighting, errors as you type, and autocomplete for class members. The extension is not on the marketplace, unfortunately - to install it, you'll want to symlink the vscode folder at the top level of the bytec repository to [VSCODE-DIRECTIORY]/extensions/bytec-basic - the VSCode directory is ~/.vscode-oss on Linux. The extension assumes you've installed bytec to $HOME/.cargo/bin, which is the default on Linux (and I think also on Mac?).

Alternatively, if you open the bytec repository in VSCode and then click F5 (or "Launch Extension" in the Run and Debug menu), it should open a new VSCode window with the extension loaded, without needing to install the extension manually - but you'd need to do that every time you use it, so actually installing the extension is preferred.