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Installation & Building

Arch Linux

If you’re on Arch (or an Arch-based distro) with an AUR helper, this is the fastest path — no manual build required:

yay -S lumen-lang-git

Once installed, it’s available on your PATH as lumen. Verify it:

lumen --version

If you’re not on Arch, or prefer building from source, follow the steps below instead.

Building from source

Lumen doesn’t have packaged binaries for other platforms yet — you build it from source. This is a five-minute process.

Requirements

  • A Linux or Unix-like operating system
  • A C++20-capable compiler
  • CMake

Building

Clone the repository and build with CMake, out-of-source, from the repository root:

git clone https://github.com/spikest3r/LumenLang.git
cd LumenLang

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make -j$(nproc)

Once the build finishes, the executable is available at:

./build/lumen

You can optionally copy or symlink it somewhere on your PATH so you can call lumen from any directory:

sudo ln -s "$(pwd)/lumen" /usr/local/bin/lumen

(run this from inside the build directory, so $(pwd) resolves to .../LumenLang/build)

Verifying the build

Whichever install method you used, check the version and build metadata:

lumen --version

Next: Your First Program.