Getting Grain

Building Grain

To build the compiler, you’ll need yarn and Node.js version 14 or higher.

Start by cloning the Grain repository:

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git clone git@github.com:grain-lang/grain.git
cd grain

To get everything set up, run:

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yarn
yarn setup
yarn compiler:build

Running yarn setup will set up the Grain runtime, standard library, and CLI, and yarn compiler:build will compile the compiler (it’s pretty meta—we know).

After running these commands, you’ve have two new commands available on your command line—grainc and grain. The grainc command is the standalone compiler, and the grain command is a CLI tool that both compiles and runs Grain programs. Throughout the guide, we’ll mostly be using grain.

You can check that everything is installed properly by running the compiler and CLI help commands:

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grainc --help
grain --help

As long as those commands work, you’re all set!

We’ll first use the grain CLI to compile and run a Hello World program, but first let’s set up our editor.