Getting Grain

We have a couple different ways to get Grain. Most developers will prefer the Packaged Grain binaries, but make sure to read the note about speed!

Packaged Grain

The Grain toolchain (including our CLI, compiler, runtime, and standard library) is shipped as a single binary. Binaries are available for MacOS x64, Linux x64, and Windows x64.

Note: These binaries are a bit slow when first building a project (around 70 seconds). The packaged compiler is running in JavaScript, and it builds and writes the runtime & standard library into your project. If you need raw speed, you can build the native compiler from source! See Building Grain from Source below.

MacOS x64 - Homebrew

The easiest way to install on MacOS is to install from our cask using homebrew.

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brew install --no-quarantine --cask grain-lang/tap/grain

The --no-quarantine flag will avoid having to approve the binary in the Security Center.

MacOS x64 - Download

If you’d prefer not to use homebrew, you can download it directly from GitHub or using curl.

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sudo curl -L --output /usr/local/bin/grain \
https://github.com/grain-lang/grain/releases/download/grain-v0.3.2/grain-mac-x64 \
&& sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/grain

Linux x64 - Download

You can download it directly from GitHub or using curl.

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sudo curl -L --output /usr/local/bin/grain \
https://github.com/grain-lang/grain/releases/download/grain-v0.3.2/grain-linux-x64 \
&& sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/grain

Windows x64 - Download

You can download it directly from GitHub or using curl.

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curl -LO https://github.com/grain-lang/grain/releases/download/grain-v0.3.2/grain-win-x64.exe

You’ll either want to put it into your path or keep it inside your project and invoke with .\grain-win-x64.exe.

Building Grain from Source

To get access to the entirely native compiler, you can build Grain from source.

First, you’ll need Node.js v14 and Yarn.

Start by cloning the Grain repository:

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git clone git://github.com/grain-lang/grain
cd grain

To get everything set up, run:

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yarn
yarn compiler build

Running yarn will fetch our dependencies and then set up the Grain runtime, standard library, and CLI. To rebuild any of those without checking dependencies, you can run yarn prepare separately.

Running yarn compiler build will compile the compiler (it’s pretty meta—we know).

After running these commands, you’ll have a new command available on your command line—grain. The grain command is a CLI tool that both compiles and runs Grain programs.

You can check that everything is installed properly by running the version command:

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grain --version

If you see a a version for the CLI and the compiler, you’re all set!

We’ll first use the grain CLI to compile and run a Hello World program, but first let’s set up our editor.