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Kāra

Getting Started

Install a prebuilt binary

Section titled “Install a prebuilt binary”

Development-preview builds of karac are published on the releases page. Each release carries self-contained bundles (no LLVM or Rust required on your machine) for:

  • Linux x86_64 (x86_64-linux)
  • Linux ARM64 (aarch64-linux)
  • macOS Apple silicon (aarch64-macos)

Download the newest tarball for your platform, then:

Terminal window
tar xzf karac-*.tar.gz
export PATH="$PWD/karac-<version>-<platform>/bin:$PATH"
karac --version

The layout is relocatable — karac finds its runtime libraries relative to its own location, so the unpacked directory can live anywhere. Add the export PATH line to your shell profile to make it stick.

On macOS, Gatekeeper quarantines downloaded binaries; clear it once after unpacking:

Terminal window
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine karac-<version>-<platform>

karac run (JIT) works out of the box. karac build (native binaries) additionally needs a C linker — build-essential on Debian/Ubuntu, Xcode Command Line Tools on macOS. WebAssembly targets (--target=wasm_*) are not bundled in the preview; build from source for those.

These are pre-v1 preview builds: expect breakage, and report issues with the exact karac --version string — its +g<sha> suffix pins the commit the binary was built from.

Build from source

Section titled “Build from source”

Alternatively, build karac yourself. You’ll need a Rust toolchain and, for native compilation, LLVM 18.

Terminal window
git clone https://github.com/karalang/kara
cd kara
cargo build --release --features llvm
# Runtime archives for `karac build` — lean first, then full (order matters:
# both emit the same canonical filename).
cargo rustc -p karac-runtime --release --no-default-features --features net --crate-type staticlib
cp target/release/libkarac_runtime.a target/release/libkarac_runtime_min.a
cargo rustc -p karac-runtime --release --crate-type staticlib

The compiler is at target/release/karac; add it to your PATH. See the repository README for the full recipe, including the WebAssembly runtime archives.

Hello, world

Section titled “Hello, world”

Create hello.kara:

fn main() {
    println("Hello, world!");
}

Build and run it:

Terminal window
karac run hello.kara

Or compile a native binary:

Terminal window
karac build hello.kara
./hello

Next steps

Section titled “Next steps”

Full language documentation is in progress. Until then: