Building from Source

Building overview

Building Beef from source is not required for platforms that have binary distributions available (ie: Windows).

Source code is available at https://github.com/beefytech/Beef.

Bootstrapping

The core of the Beef compiler is written in C++, while the IDE and command-line BeefBuild build system is written in Beef itself. For bootstrapping purposes, Beef includes a minimal bootstrapping compiler whose sole job is to perform an initial BeefBuild build, which then performs a ‘proper’ build of itself.

Building on Windows

Requirements

• Microsoft C++ build tools for Visual Studio 2017 or later. You can install just Microsoft Visual C++ Build Tools or the entire Visual Studio suite from https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/#build-tools-for-visual-studio-2022.
• Platform Toolset 141 (VS2017)
• Windows SDK 10.0.17763.0
• CMake 3.15 or newer
• Python 3.6 or newer
• Git command line tools

Build Steps

• Execute bin/build.bat

Note that this will first download and build LLVM, which will take some time. The build results will be in IDE/dist

Building on Linux and macOS

Requirements

• CMake 3.15 or newer
• Python 2.7
• Git

Build Steps

• Build Beef with bin/build.sh

This will build dependencies such as LLVM, which can take quite some time.

The build results will be in IDE/dist

Please note that the CLI tools such as BeefBuild are supported on these platforms, but the the IDE is currently only available for Windows.