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Appendix A: Installation Guide

“The best programming language is useless if you can’t install it. Make installation trivial, and adoption follows. Make it hard, and even great technology dies in obscurity.” - Noah Gift

Current Status

⚠️ Important: Ruchy is currently in early development. The compiler exists as a Rust project that transpiles Ruchy code to Rust. There are no official installers or package manager distributions yet.

Building from Source

Prerequisites

You’ll need Rust installed on your system:

# Install Rust (if not already installed)
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

Clone and Build

# Clone the Ruchy compiler repository
git clone https://github.com/paiml/ruchy.git
cd ruchy

# Build the compiler
cargo build --release

# After building, the compiled binary is located at:
# target/release/ruchy

Manual Installation

# Copy to a location in your PATH (Unix-like systems)
sudo cp target/release/ruchy /usr/local/bin/

# Or add to PATH
export PATH="$PWD/target/release:$PATH"

Using Ruchy

Once built, you can use the Ruchy compiler to transpile .ruchy files to Rust:

# Transpile a Ruchy file to Rust
ruchy transpile input.ruchy -o output.rs

# Then compile the Rust code
rustc output.rs -o program
./program

Development Setup

Running Tests

# In the ruchy directory
cargo test

Using Ruchy REPL

# Start the REPL
cargo run --bin ruchy repl

IDE Support

Currently, there is no official IDE support for Ruchy. However:

  1. Syntax Highlighting: You can use Rust syntax highlighting as a temporary solution since Ruchy syntax is similar
  2. This Book: The Ruchy book (this documentation) includes custom syntax highlighting for viewing Ruchy code

Future Installation Plans

The following installation methods are planned but not yet available:

  • Official binary releases
  • Package manager support (Homebrew, apt, etc.)
  • One-line installers
  • VS Code extension
  • Language server protocol (LSP) implementation

Getting Help

  • GitHub Issues: https://github.com/paiml/ruchy/issues
  • Source Code: https://github.com/paiml/ruchy

Important Notes

  1. No Official Releases: There are no official release binaries yet
  2. No Package Managers: Ruchy is not available through any package manager
  3. Build from Source: Currently, building from source is the only way to use Ruchy
  4. Experimental: The language is experimental and the syntax/features may change

Verifying Your Installation

After building from source:

# Check if ruchy is accessible
ruchy --help

# Try transpiling a simple program
echo 'fun main() { println("Hello from Ruchy!") }' > test.ruchy
ruchy transpile test.ruchy -o test.rs
rustc test.rs -o test
./test

If you encounter issues, please report them at the GitHub repository.