A native binary in five minutes.

Download a release

v0.13.11-alpha is available to early-access testers: see the downloads page. Grab the archive for your platform, linux-x64, macos-x64, macos-arm64, or windows-x64. Each contains the astra compiler and the mifa package manager. Unpack, put them on your PATH, done.

Write and verify a program

Write a program and check it in milliseconds, before anything is built.

fn main() -> int:
    let name = "world"
    print("Hello, ${name}!")
    return 0

verify typechecks without generating code, it's the fast feedback path, for humans and agents alike:

$ astra verify hello.astra
Verification passed

$ astra verify --error-format=json hello.astra
{"success": true, "diagnostics": []}

Prerequisites

Only native builds need these. astra run and astra verify work without them.

• LLVM tools: llc on your PATH (brew install llvm on macOS)
• A C compiler: clang or gcc, for linking the small runtime

The compiler invokes llc and clang to turn LLVM IR into your native executable. Primary tested platform is macOS ARM64; the Linux, Windows and Intel-macOS builds come from CI.

Compile and run natively

Once it verifies, one command turns it into a real executable.

$ astra compile hello.astra --output hello
$ ./hello
Hello, world!

The output is a real machine-code executable, no interpreter, no VM, no Python on the target machine.

Explore interactively

The REPL lets you try the language a line at a time.

$ astra repl
astra> let x = 21;
astra> print(x * 2);
42
astra> :quit

The REPL (alpha) accumulates your session and re-compiles the whole program on each entry, errors roll back cleanly. :help, :show, :reset, :quit.

Start a real project with Mifa

Mifa turns a folder into a project with a manifest and a reproducible lockfile.

$ mifa init myapp   # creates myapp/ with astra.toml and src/
$ cd myapp
$ mifa verify
$ mifa lock         # reproducible astra.lock
$ mifa run

See the Mifa page for manifests, path dependencies, and the lockfile contract.

Since v0.10: mifa init myapp creates the myapp/ folder itself, mifa add lib --path ../lib makes another local package importable, and a program can span several files with import: see the language tour.

Where to go from here

Pick your next page by what you want to do.