Install

Get the hale toolchain on your path.

There are two ways to get hale: download a prebuilt binary (quickest), or build from source (for contributors, or a platform without a prebuilt). Either way, read What you need to run programs — hale is a compiler that shells out to a C toolchain, so it has a couple of runtime requirements no matter how you install it.

Quickest: prebuilt binary

Grab the tarball for your platform from the releases page:

tar -xzf hale-<version>-<triple>.tar.gz
# The archive contains `hale` AND `libhale_ts_shim.a` — keep them
# in the SAME directory: the compiler looks for the shim next to
# its own binary and can't link programs without it.
sudo cp hale libhale_ts_shim.a /usr/local/bin/   # or anywhere on PATH, together
hale --help

The binary is self-contained with respect to LLVM — LLVM 18 is statically linked in, so you do not need to install LLVM to run the compiler. (Intel Macs: run the Apple-Silicon build under Rosetta 2.)

What you need to run programs

Regardless of how you installed hale, compiling a program (hale run / hale build) recompiles and links the runtime on your machine, so you need a C toolchain present:

• clang on your PATH (bare or clang-18) — used to assemble and link the emitted native code. lld is additionally needed only if you build with LOTUS_LTO=1 or target wasm32.
• OpenSSL shared libraries (libssl / libcrypto) — the standard library’s TLS client links against them unconditionally.

Installing clang pulls in libLLVM as clang’s own dependency — that’s expected and harmless; hale itself doesn’t need it.

Build from source

Requirements:

• Rust 1.95 or newer (the compiler is written in Rust).
• LLVM 18 development libraries, with llvm-config-18 on your PATH (or LLVM_SYS_180_PREFIX pointing at the install). LLVM 17, 19, and 20 will not link — the backend is pinned to 18.
• clang (+ lld for LTO / wasm), OpenSSL headers, and git.

Debian / Ubuntu (LLVM 18 is in stock apt on 24.04+):

sudo apt install llvm-18-dev libpolly-18-dev libzstd-dev \
                 clang-18 libclang-18-dev lld-18 zlib1g-dev \
                 libssl-dev pkg-config git

Fedora

sudo dnf install llvm18-devel clang18 lld openssl-devel git

macOS (Homebrew)

brew install llvm@18 openssl git
export LLVM_SYS_180_PREFIX="$(brew --prefix llvm@18)"

Then:

git clone https://github.com/hale-lang/hale
cd hale
cargo build --release

The hale binary lands at target/release/hale (and libhale_ts_shim.a beside it). Put the binary on your path, or invoke it through Cargo as shown below.

Reproducible / release build

release/docker-compose.yml builds a self-contained Linux tarball in a pinned ubuntu:24.04 + LLVM 18 container, so you don’t have to match the toolchain locally:

docker compose -f release/docker-compose.yml run --rm build
# -> dist/hale-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz

Platform support

Verify

hale --help

Or through Cargo from a source checkout:

cargo run -p hale-cli --bin hale -- --help

To run the compiler’s own test suite (single-threaded avoids “text file busy” flakes from parallel test binaries racing on the same temp path):

cargo test --release --workspace -- --test-threads=1

The two ways to run a program

Both go through the same LLVM-native compiler — there’s no separate interpreter, so they never disagree:

• hale run prog.hl — compiles and runs in one step (the binary is temporary). The fast inner loop while you write.
• hale build prog.hl — compiles to a native binary on disk via LLVM. This is the artifact you ship.

hale run   prog.hl   # compile + run
hale build prog.hl   # compile to ./prog
./prog

Throughout this guide we write hale run / hale build as if hale is on your path. From a source checkout without it installed, prefix with cargo run -p hale-cli --bin hale --.

Next: Your first run.