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Install

esque currently targets Linux x86-64 only. The compiler shells out to the system ld to produce final executables; everything before that is self-contained.

Prerequisites​

  • Go 1.25 or later (go version)
  • A working ld — present on essentially every Linux system that has glibc or musl
  • A CPU with SSE2 (every x86-64 CPU). AVX2 is detected and used when available; without it the SSE path is taken automatically

If you want to run the benchmarks against C, you also want gcc with -mavx2 support. That is optional.

Get the source​

git clone https://github.com/esque-lang/esquec.git
cd esquec

Build the compiler​

go build -o esquec ./cmd/esquec

That single binary is the whole toolchain. Drop it on your $PATH or keep it in the repo.

Sanity-check​

./esquec build examples/02_functions.esq -o /tmp/sq
/tmp/sq; echo $?
# 25

The example computes 3² + 4² and exits with the result. If you saw 25, you are ready.

Run the test suite (optional)​

go test ./...

This runs unit tests for every package plus the end-to-end suite in tests/e2e/, which compiles small .esq programs, runs them, and asserts on exit codes (or stdout, for print_* intrinsics).

What you do not need​

  • LLVM
  • A C toolchain (other than the linker itself)
  • A package manager beyond go
  • Any runtime library to link your programs against

The only external program esque invokes at compile time is ld.

Next: Hello, world​