Installation

Marrow ships as a single marrow binary plus the QBE backend binary and the std/ sources. All three are bundled together in each GitHub release.

Requirements

Whatever installation method you use, you will also need a system C compiler available on your PATH:

• Linux / macOS: cc (or any compiler that responds to the cc alias, e.g. GCC or Clang).
• Windows: gcc.

This is required because Marrow does not link executables itself — it generates QBE IL, asks the qbe binary to turn that into assembly, and then shells out to your C compiler to assemble and link the final binary. If no supported C compiler is found for your OS, the compiler will stop after producing the .s assembly file only.

Linux & macOS

Run the install script. It downloads the right release archive for your CPU architecture, unpacks the marrow and qbe binaries plus the std/ library into ~/.marrow, and appends ~/.marrow/bin to your shell profile’s PATH.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zuygui/marrow/main/install.sh | sh

What it does, concretely:

1. Detects your OS (Linux / Darwin) and architecture (x86_64 / aarch64/arm64).
2. Downloads https://github.com/zuygui/marrow/releases/latest/download/marrow-<arch>-<platform>.tar.gz.
3. Installs the binaries to ~/.marrow/bin/marrow and ~/.marrow/bin/qbe.
4. Copies the bundled std/ sources to ~/.marrow/std (this is what makes @import("std/...") resolve out of the box — see Modules & imports).
5. Adds export PATH="$HOME/.marrow/bin:$PATH" to ~/.zshrc, ~/.bashrc, or ~/.profile (whichever matches your $SHELL).

After it finishes, either restart your terminal or re-source your profile, then check that everything is on PATH:

marrow --version
qbe -h

Supported targets

The official release archives currently cover:

OS	Architecture
Linux	x86_64
macOS	aarch64 (Apple Silicon)

If your architecture isn’t published as a release yet, you can always build from source (see below).

Windows

There is a Windows release archive (marrow-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.zip) published alongside every release, containing marrow.exe, qbe.exe and std/. For now, install it manually:

1. Download marrow-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.zip from the latest release.
2. Extract it somewhere, e.g. %USERPROFILE%\.marrow.
3. Add that folder to your PATH so marrow.exe and qbe.exe are reachable.
4. Make sure gcc is installed and on PATH (e.g. via MSYS2/MinGW-w64) — it’s what Marrow shells out to for the final assemble + link step on Windows.

Note

An install.ps1 script exists in the repository for Windows, but at the time of writing it mirrors install.sh line-for-line rather than being genuine PowerShell — treat the manual steps above as the reliable path on Windows until that script is fixed upstream.

Building from source

Marrow’s own compiler is a small Rust (Cargo) project with no external crate dependencies, so building it is a plain cargo build:

git clone https://github.com/zuygui/marrow.git
cd marrow
cargo build --release
# binary is at target/release/marrow

You’ll also need to build QBE itself, since it’s a separate C project:

git clone git://c9x.me/qbe.git
cd qbe
make
# binary is at ./qbe — put it on your PATH, alongside marrow

Finally, make sure the std/ folder from this repository is discoverable — either copy it to ~/.marrow/std, or keep it next to the source files you’re compiling (see Modules & imports for the exact search order).

Verifying the install

marrow --version
# Marrow version: v0.1.0

If marrow --version works, move on to Hello World.