Installation

There are two ways to obtain a working Cloth toolchain: install a pre-built compiler, or build the compiler from source.

Quick Start (Installer)

Download the latest compiler installer for your operating system from the official distribution and follow the on-screen instructions. Administrator permissions may be required.

After installation, verify the toolchain is on your PATH:

$ cloth ?

This prints the help screen and confirms that the cloth command is available.

Build From Source

Building from source is supported but is not the recommended path for most users. The bootstrap compiler is written in C# and F# and targets the .NET 10 SDK; it produces Cloth IR (CIR), which is then lowered to LLVM IR and linked into a native executable.

Required third-party tools

The following tools must be installed and available on your PATH before building Cloth from source:

• Git — used to clone the repository and its submodules.
• Clang (LLVM) — used as the backend code generator and linker. The Cloth compiler emits LLVM IR, which is then assembled and linked by Clang.

Steps

1. Clone the Cloth repository.
2. Restore the .NET solution. The repository contains three projects:

• Frontend (C#) — lexer, parser, and AST.
• Compiler (C#) — semantic analysis, Cloth IR, and LLVM emission.
• Commands (F#) — the cloth command-line driver.

3. Build the solution. The output is the cloth executable that drives the full compilation pipeline.

The compiler runs in two passes:

1. Symbol collection — all modules in the project are merged and top-level declarations are registered.
2. Semantic analysis and code generation — type checking, ownership and lifetime enforcement, IR generation, and backend emission.

A successful build produces the cloth driver, which exposes the build, run, new, lexer, parser, and help commands.