Hacking On Mull

Note

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Codespaces and Devcontainers

For development on Linux, Mull provides devcontainers that can be used either via Codespaces or locally.

Codespaces

To start a Codespace, go to the Mull’s GitHub page and follow Code -> Codespaces -> Dots (...) -> New with options:

Then choose the right combination of OS/LLVM version and hit Create Codespace:

After a couple of minutes you’ll get a fully functional dev environment ready for hacking.

Follow this doc to connect to a Codespace from your local machine.

Devcontainers

You can get similar setup locally via Devcontainers.

The following commands setup a devcontainer using Ubuntu 24.04, LLVM 17 and build&run Mull’s test suite.

npm install -g @devcontainers/cli
devcontainer up --workspace-folder . --config ./.devcontainer/ubuntu_24.04_17/devcontainer.json
devcontainer exec --workspace-folder . --config ./.devcontainer/ubuntu_24.04_17/devcontainer.json bash
cmake --workflow --preset build-and-test

Follow these instructions to connect to a devcontainer from VSCode.

Internals

For better understanding of Mull’s internals it may be helpful to get through the second and third sections of this paper: Mull it over: mutation testing based on LLVM from ICST 2018.