Install

Prerequisites and how to get the toolchain.

Prerequisites

JVM 17 or newer. Needed to run the CLI itself. Any distribution works (Temurin, GraalVM, Zulu, Oracle).
sbt 1.9 or newer. Used as the build and runner front-end. Install via SDKMAN (sdk install sbt) or Homebrew (brew install sbt).
clang on $PATH. Required only by nex compile (the AOT path). The interpreter (nex run, nex test) doesn’t need it. macOS ships clang via the Xcode Command Line Tools (xcode-select --install); Linux distros bundle clang in their package manager (apt install clang, dnf install clang, etc.).

Verify each is installed:

java   -version   # 17+
sbt    --version  # 1.9+
clang  --version  # any recent

Get the source

There is no published binary yet. Clone the repository and build from source:

git clone https://github.com/edadma/nex.git
cd nex
sbt nexJVM/compile     # first build pulls dependencies; subsequent runs are fast

The first sbt invocation downloads dependencies (several minutes). After that the build is incremental and quick.

Supported targets

The AOT compile path is verified end-to-end on Mac arm64. Linux x86_64 and Linux aarch64 should work — the codegen emits portable LLVM IR and shells out to whatever clang finds — but neither is exercised on every commit. Report any platform-specific issues.

The interpreter (nex run, nex test) runs anywhere the JVM does, including Windows. The same code path also builds for Scala.js (Node) and Scala Native — every commit runs the cross-platform unit-test suite on all three targets — so embedding the interpreter in a browser playground or a static binary is straightforward when the need arises.

Next step

Once the build succeeds: run your first program.