Installation

Install ceesafec

On macOS and Linux:

curl -fsSL https://ceesafe.github.io/CeeSafe/install.sh | sh

On Windows, in PowerShell:

irm https://ceesafe.github.io/CeeSafe/install.ps1 | iex

The script downloads the latest release of ceesafec for your machine from GitHub, checks its SHA-256, and installs it in ~/.ceesafe/bin (%USERPROFILE%\.ceesafe\bin). On macOS and Linux it then tells you how to add that directory to your PATH; on Windows it adds it for you. CEESAFE_VERSION=v0.1.0 installs a given release instead. Run the same line again to update.

Releases are built for macOS (arm64 and x64, signed and notarized by Apple), Linux (x64 and arm64; glibc 2.35 or newer: Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 12, Fedora 36 and later) and Windows (x64 and arm64). You can also download an archive from the releases page yourself: each holds ceesafec (ceesafec.exe), and SHA256SUMS lists their checksums. ceesafec is one native executable: its runtime, its libraries and this specification are inside it, and it needs nothing else to run.

ceesafec --version

Requirements

	For	Notes
A C compiler: clang, gcc or MSVC	ceesafec build, and building ceesafec from source	clang and gcc are fully supported; MSVC is best-effort (/std:c11). check, run --interp, fmt, lsp and mcp need none
git	dependencies from git repositories	only for packages that use them
Node.js and Vite+	the VS Code extension	optional

Build from source

To work on CeeSafe itself, or on a platform without a release, build ceesafec from the repository. It is written in CeeSafe and builds itself, so the first build of a checkout needs a ceesafec: a release's, or one built from a release's C seed with a C compiler alone.

With a released ceesafec (any platform's archive from the releases, or the one install.sh put in ~/.ceesafe/bin):

git clone https://github.com/CeeSafe/CeeSafe.git
cd CeeSafe
sh tools/bootstrap_release.sh ~/.ceesafe/bin/ceesafec HEAD out/ceesafec
out/ceesafec --version

tools/bootstrap_release.sh builds, with the release, the commits recorded for it in the script (a compiler cannot always build a tree whose own sources use library code added after it), then the tree you checked out.

On a platform with no release, build a ceesafec from ceesafec-<version>-seed.tar.gz, attached to every release: it is ceesafec's own C, and its README.md gives the one cc (or cl) command. That ceesafec builds the tree of its release's tag directly.

After that, ceesafec rebuilds itself:

out/ceesafec build -o out/ceesafec.new && mv out/ceesafec.new out/ceesafec

ceesafec is one native executable: its runtime, its libraries and this specification are inside it, so it can be copied anywhere, for example onto your PATH as ~/.local/bin/ceesafec.

To check everything, run the contract suite (the repository's spec/testing.md; it compiles and runs the corpus many times, checks the fixed point, and sweeps allocation failures):

python3 tools/contract_tests.py --ceesafec out/ceesafec

Check that it works

cat > hello.cee <<'EOF'
fn main() {
    Console.writeLine("Hello, CeeSafe");
}
EOF
ceesafec build hello.cee -o hello && ./hello      # through C, to a native program
ceesafec run --interp hello.cee                   # or in the reference interpreter

ceesafec build uses the C compiler in $CC, or cc; --cc clang picks one. On Windows it finds one itself: clang (winget install LLVM.LLVM), MinGW's gcc, or Visual Studio's cl, and it sets up Visual Studio's headers and libraries for clang and cl when you are not in a developer prompt. So with LLVM and Visual Studio's "Desktop development with C++" workload (or its Build Tools) installed, ceesafec build works from any terminal and makes out\hello.exe (tooling §8).

Editor support

The repository has a VS Code extension in editors/vscode: syntax highlighting, and through ceesafec lsp errors as you type, hover, go to definition, the outline and formatting. See Editors to build and install it, and to use the language server from other editors.