Installation

Prerequisites

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• Rust 1.95.0 (pinned by rust-toolchain.toml; rustup)
• Python 3 development headers (for PyO3 interop)
• Linux or macOS. Windows is not supported yet — use WSL and build inside a Linux environment.
• A C compiler and linker (GCC/Clang + GNU bfd linker on Linux)

Building from Source

git clone https://github.com/nulang-org/nulang.git
cd nulang
cargo build --release

The release build uses opt-level=3, LTO, and single codegen-unit for maximum performance. A debug build (cargo build) is faster to compile but runs ~10x slower.

Feature Flags

Nulang supports optional features for leaner builds:

# Minimal build (no Python, SQLite, LSP, AI runtime, or networking)
cargo build --release --no-default-features

# With WASM backend
cargo build --release --features wasm-backend

# All features
cargo build --release --all-features

Feature	Default	Description
native-codegen	On	Cranelift-backed tiered JIT and the native/AOT backend
python	On	PyO3 Python interop
sqlite	On	libsql/Turso persistence
lsp	On	tower-lsp language server
ai-runtime	On	AI runtime — LLM providers, pipelines, debates, supervisor teams
tls	On	TLS support for the TCP transport
ffi	On	Dynamic native library loading (extern FFI) via libloading/libffi
tcp	On	Raw TCP networking — distributed-actor transport, HTTP server, metrics/registry/DAP servers
ureq	On	Synchronous HTTP client for Http.get/Http.post, the registry client, and nula deploy
wasm-backend	Off	WASM compiler + Wasmtime runtime (enables --backend wasm|wasm-run|wasm-aot)
wasmfx-backend	Off	WasmFX stack-switching backend for suspending effects (requires wasm-backend)
http-client	Off	Async HTTP client (reqwest)
rocksdb	Off	RocksDB persistence backend
postgres	Off	PostgreSQL persistence backend
otel	Off	OpenTelemetry observability
difffuzz	Off	Differential fuzzing driver binary

Verifying the Build

# Run the test suite
cargo test

# Start the REPL
cargo run -- --repl

# Run a Nulang program
cargo run -- examples/fibonacci.nula

System-Specific Notes

Fedora Linux

Install Python development headers:

sudo dnf install python3-devel

The build.rs script automatically creates a libpythonX.Y.so symlink for PyO3 linking.

macOS

Install Python via Homebrew:

brew install python@3.14

Next Steps

Now that Nulang is installed, follow the Quick Start guide to write your first program, and set up your editor with the VS Code extension or the language server.