Getting Grain

Building Grain

Grain currently only works on Mac and Linux. We are hard at work trying to integrate Binaryen and OCaml on Windows, but this is uncharted territory! Please let us know if you have this low-level expertise.

To build the compiler, you’ll need Node.js v14 and Yarn.

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 compiler build

Running yarn will fetch our dependencies and then set up the Grain runtime, standard library, and CLI. To rebuild any of those without checking dependencies, you can run yarn prepare separately.

Running yarn compiler build will compile the compiler (it’s pretty meta—we know).

After running these commands, you’ll have a new command available on your command line—grain. The grain command is a CLI tool that both compiles and runs Grain programs.

You can check that everything is installed properly by running the version command:

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grain --version

If you see a a version for the CLI and the compiler, 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.