INSTALL.md

Installing tools and dependencies

Rust

The Rust Programming language and cargo are required to build the Hash compiler. The easiest way to install Rust is using rustup.

LLVM

One of the Hash compiler code generation backends is LLVM, so you will need to install LLVM on your system. Currently, the compiler uses LLVM 15.0.6.

Building without LLVM

We all know that LLVM is a huge and bulky dependency, which isn't always easy to install on a local machine. Therefore, this project provides a way to build the compiler without LLVM. To do so, you can simply build the main package in the following way:

cargo build -p hashc --no-default-features

This will build the compiler without the llvm feature, and hence you won't have the LLVM backend available.

Linux, macOS

You can download this version of LLVM from here for your specific OS. Additionally, you need to install zstd (which can be aquired using a package manager or from here).

Once LLVM 15.0.6 and zstd are installed, you need to set the following environment variables, replacing $PATH_TO_LLVM and $PATH_TO_ZSTD appropriately for your system depending on your installation:

# hashc-related
export LIBRARY_PATH="$LIBRARY_PATH:$PATH_TO_ZSTD/lib"
export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH="$DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH:$PATH_TO_LLVM/lib"
export LDFLAGS="-L$PATH_TO_LLVM/lib"
export CPPFLAGS="-I$PATH_TO_LLVM/include"
export PATH="$PATH:$PATH_TO_LLVM/bin"
export LLVM_SYS_150_PREFIX="$PATH_TO_LLVM"

This can be put in your shell script startup file (.zprofile/.bash_profile/etc), or in a shell script and you can source it whenever you want to use hashc (the former is recommended).

Now, you should be able to run cargo build on hashc and it should work.

Windows

To install on Windows, the simplest way to install it is using Chocolatey:

choco install llvm --version 15.0.6

Alternatively, you can download the pre-built binaries from the LLVM website.