Building the Compiler

scpp is currently built from source. If you have the repository checked out, the first job is to produce a working scpp binary.

What you need

For a source build, prepare:

• CMake 3.28 or newer
• Ninja
• Clang/LLVM 22
• SQLite development headers and libraries
• zstd development headers and libraries

On Debian or Ubuntu, that looks like this:

sudo apt install clang cmake ninja-build llvm-22-dev libsqlite3-dev libzstd-dev

Configure and build

From the repository root, run:

cmake -S . -B build -G Ninja -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/usr/lib/llvm-22/lib/cmake/llvm
cmake --build build

When that finishes, the freshly built compiler is available at:

./build/scpp

Optional: install it somewhere on your PATH

If you want the rest of this chapter’s commands to use scpp directly instead of ./build/scpp, install the build into a prefix you control:

cmake --install build --prefix "$HOME/.local/scpp"
export PATH="$HOME/.local/scpp/bin:$PATH"

That install step creates a self-contained tree containing the compiler and the stdlib files it needs.

If you prefer not to install anything yet, that is fine too. You can keep using ./build/scpp from the repository root.

What you have now

At this point you have a real compiler binary. The next section uses it to build the smallest possible scpp program.

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