Getting Started

Installation

Download the archive for your platform from the releases page. Builds exist for Linux, macOS and Windows, on amd64 and arm64. Each archive holds a single rune binary; put it somewhere on your PATH:

# macOS on Apple silicon; swap the version and platform for yours
curl -LO https://github.com/kryptamine/rune/releases/download/v0.1.0/rune-0.1.0-darwin-arm64.tar.gz
tar -xzf rune-0.1.0-darwin-arm64.tar.gz
sudo mv rune-0.1.0-darwin-arm64/rune /usr/local/bin/
rune version

checksums.txt on the same page lists the SHA-256 sum of every archive.

From source

Building needs Go 1.27+. Clone the repository and run:

make build

This produces the rune binary in the project directory.

Your First Program

Save this as hello.rn:

let name = "world";
print("hello, {name}!");

and run it:

$ rune run hello.rn
hello, world!

Arguments after the file go to the program’s main:

fun main(args) {
    let name = args.len() > 0 ? args[0] : "world";
    print("hello, {name}!");
}

$ rune run greet.rn ann
hello, ann!

make run builds and runs program.rn, a scratch file ignored by git.

Interpreter Commands

• run — runs the program in the file.
• evaluate — evaluates a single expression in the file and prints its value.
• tokenize — prints the tokens of the file.
• disasm — prints the bytecode the file compiles to.
• fmt — prints the file formatted; fmt -w <path>... rewrites files and directories in place, fmt --check <path>... lists the unformatted ones and exits 1.
• version — prints the interpreter’s version.

$ echo '(2 + 3) * 4' > expr.rn
$ rune evaluate expr.rn
20