Installing Brass

For a usable local installation, build the complete toolchain archive. Build only the driver binary when you are working on the compiler itself.

Clone the repository

First, clone the Brass source code:

git clone https://github.com/brass-cz/brass.git
cd brass

Install the Rust compiler

Brass is written in Rust, so you need the Rust compiler installed first.

You can learn how to install Rust here: https://rust-lang.org/tools/install/

Build the complete toolchain

The recommended build creates the same layout as a release:

./scripts/pack.sh

The script builds brass, czls, and czfmt, builds the standard-library plugins, creates the czpm launcher, verifies the package manager, and writes brass-<host-target>.tar.gz in the repository root. The archive contains a ready-to-move bin/ and std/ tree; keep those directories together after extracting it, and add bin/ to PATH.

The x helper used by the script bootstraps the Rust build and downloads the LLVM toolchain required by the default native runtime.

Build only the brass binary

For compiler development, build the native driver directly:

./x cargo build --release -p brass_driver

The binary is written to target/release/brass. This command does not package the standard library, czpm, the language server, or the formatter. In particular, a repository build does not automatically resolve import std.*; use the complete toolchain above for normal use.

To build an interpreter-only driver without LLVM:

cargo build --release -p brass_driver --no-default-features

Usage

brass program.cz         # check the needed code and run it
brass check program.cz   # check the whole program; silent on success
brass repl program.cz    # run with the interpreter
brass                    # start an interactive REPL

An interactive session retains definitions and bindings between turns. Before executing the new input, it validates that input together with the accumulated session, but it does not execute earlier effectful statements again: prior prints and input() calls are not repeated.

Diagnostics are printed to stderr and produce a non-zero exit status. A normal run checks functions as it needs them; use brass check for a complete whole-program result. See Hello, world! for the practical distinction.