Compile to a Native Binary

Compile

The compile subcommand emits LLVM IR text and shells out to clang -O1 to produce a native binary:

sbt "nexJVM/runMain io.github.edadma.nex.run compile /path/to/hello.nex"

The resulting binary lands next to the source, with the .nex extension stripped:

/path/to/hello

Run it directly — no JVM, no sbt, no dependencies beyond the system C runtime:

/path/to/hello

Output is identical to what the interpreter produced.

Verify parity

The intended way to use Nex during development is to write code, run it under the interpreter for the fast edit/run cycle, then occasionally compile to native to confirm the AOT path produces the same output. Every commit to the compiler runs the full unit-test suite (over two thousand tests on JVM today) plus an interpreter-vs-AOT parity sweep that compares the two paths byte-for-byte on a shared corpus. The compiled binary’s real-number printing matches Java’s Double.toString — non-whole reals like 0.1 + 0.2 print as 0.30000000000000004, magnitudes like 1e20 print as 1.0E20, and runtime traps (assertions, array-index OOB, division by zero, slice OOB) all carry the same human-readable messages as the interpreter, written to stderr as trap: <msg>\n with exit code 1, so assert_traps(fn, substring) matches the same trap text on both sides and a shell pipeline that captures stderr sees identical bytes from either path.

When you’d reach for which

• Use run while writing code. Sub-second turnaround. Same output as the binary for everything you care about.
• Use compile when shipping, benchmarking, or producing a self-contained executable to share. The native binary is roughly an order of magnitude faster on most numerical workloads (no interpreter dispatch overhead, real LLVM optimization at -O1).
• Use test to discover and run every @test-annotated function in a project — see the Tooling chapter for details and the Test modules example for the convention.

Next step

You’re done with the getting-started path. From here:

• Examples — a feature tour plus a dozen complete programs from hello-world through a recursive FFT.
• Specification — the chapter-by-chapter language reference.
• Tooling — CLI details, verification model, supported targets.