Build and install

Lynxer is a C++17 executable with a cross-platform Windows host build. Building and running it does not need Python; Python is used by the LSP and tooling.

Requirements

A C++17 compiler (g++ or clang++) and make.
python3 for the LSP and development tooling.
A Rust toolchain (cargo): it is required, not optional. Every Rust-backed stdlib module is built by cargo, and the interpreter links the Rust native-call engine (lynxer/rust/ffi). A missing toolchain or a compile error fails the build; there is no reduced build that drops a backend.
libffi headers and pkg-config (e.g. libffi-dev on Debian/Ubuntu) for the native-call engine.
Git and network access for the first cargo build: crates are fetched from crates.io. Most crates are pure Rust, but a few compile vendored C with the system C compiler — zstd (via zstd-sys), vendored Lua (via mlua), bundled SQLite (via rusqlite) and the ring crypto provider — so a C compiler is required alongside the Rust toolchain.

No system OpenSSL, Boost, CMake, cpp-httplib, Crow, or nlohmann/json is needed: TLS is rustls, the HTTP stack is ureq/tungstenite/axum, and JSON is serde_json.

Build from the repository root

make buildLynxer       # interpreter + every stdlib module, C++ and Rust
make testLynxer        # the full suite (see README.md)

buildLynxer builds the interpreter and every backend, C++ and Rust, so a separate make cargo is only useful to rebuild the Rust half on its own. Both fail if cargo is missing.

make cargo              # just the Rust backends and the native-call engine
make buildLynxerArm64  # the ARM64 interpreter (needs an aarch64 host)

The Makefile lives at the repository root; there is no separate lynxer/Makefile.

Artifacts

lynxer/lynxer or lynxer/lynxer.exe — the interpreter for the build host.
lynxer/lynxer-arm64 — the ARM64 interpreter, from buildLynxerArm64.
lynxer/stdlib/*.so — the Linux stdlib backends. The Rust-backed modules are produced by cargo under lynxer/build/rust; the C++ ones are compiled from stdlib/*.cpp.
On Windows, lynxer/stdlib/*.so files contain MinGW PE DLLs while retaining the language-level module names used by the bundled wrappers.

lynxer/build/rust/release/liblynxer_ffi.a — the native-call engine, a Rust staticlib built by cargo and linked into lynxer/lynxer. It is not a stdlib module and is not copied into stdlib/.

lynxer/liblynxer.so on Linux, or lynxer/lynxer.dll plus lynxer/lynxer.dll.a on Windows — the embedding runtime: the interpreter core (minus main.cpp) linked as a shared library, exporting only the lynxer_embed_* entry points. Libraries built by lynxer --emit-library link against it. lynxer/lynxer.h and lynxer/ffi_abi.h are its public headers.

The Rust workspace has twenty-six member crates: the twenty-three stdlib module backends listed in LYNXER_RUST_MODULE_NAMES (compress, crypto, encoding, game, graphics, image, ini, json, lua, network, raylib, re, regex, server, sound, sqldb, text, toml, tui, uuid, watch, xml, yaml), the two crates they share (rust/abi, and rust/regex_engine, the fancy-regex engine behind re/regex), and rust/ffi, the required native-call engine described in native-module-abi.

Install

sudo ./lynxer/lynxer --install      # install into /usr/lib/lynxer, link /usr/bin/lynxer
sudo ./lynxer/lynxer --uninstall    # remove the installed interpreter

--install lays out one self-contained tree:

/usr/lib/lynxer/lynxer          the real binary
/usr/lib/lynxer/stdlib/*        every stdlib module
/usr/lib/lynxer/lynxer.config   the configuration file
/usr/lib/lynxer/liblynxer.so    the Linux embedding runtime (for --emit-library)
/usr/lib/lynxer/lynxer.h        the embedding public header
/usr/lib/lynxer/ffi_abi.h       the wire-type header
/usr/bin/lynxer                 a symlink to the real binary

Because the symlink resolves to the real binary (/proc/self/exe), an installed lynxer finds its stdlib — and the embedding runtime plus its headers for --emit-library — from any working directory, so lynxer app.lynx works without keeping the build tree around. See embedding. Set LYNXER_PREFIX to install somewhere other than /usr — for example LYNXER_PREFIX=$HOME/.local lynxer --install needs no root — and pass the same value to --uninstall.

On Windows, --install defaults to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Lynxer (a per-user install needs no elevation; override it with LYNXER_PREFIX) and lays out the same tree — bin\lynxer.exe plus lib\lynxer\{lynxer.exe, lynxer.dll, lynxer.dll.a, stdlib, lynxer.config} — except that the launcher is a copy rather than a symlink, so the stdlib is resolved from lib\lynxer. --emit-library is available with the MinGW toolchain; consumers need lynxer.dll on the Windows DLL search path. Add <prefix>\bin to PATH to run lynxer by name; the installer says so when it is missing. See windows.

See CLI.

Quick run

./lynxer/lynxer lynxer/examples/milestone5.lynx
./lynxer/lynxer --list-stdlibs
./lynxer/lynxer --compile lynxer/examples/milestone5.lynx -o /tmp/demo

Example programs live under lynxer/examples/, so run them with that prefix from the repository root.

Environment variables

Variable	Used by	Effect
`LYNXER_OPT_REPORT=1`	the interpreter	print the AST optimizer counts to stderr after the run
`LYNXER_GAME_HEADLESS=1`	the `game` module	run without opening a window
`LYNXER_GRAPHICS_HEADLESS=1`	the `graphics` module	run without opening a window
`LYNXER_SKIP_DISPLAY=1`	`make testLynxer`	skip the display and audio fixtures (used by CI)

The first three are described in more detail in CLI and limitations.