Environment setup

Scala Native has the following build dependencies:

  • Java 8 or newer
  • sbt 0.13.13 or newer
  • LLVM/Clang 3.7 or newer

And following runtime library dependencies:

  • libunwind 0.99 or newer (built-in on macOS)
  • Boehm GC 7.6.0 (optional)
  • Re2 2017-01-01 (optional)
  • zlib 1.2.8 or newer (optional)

Most of the runtime dependencies are completely optional and are only required if you use the corresponding feature.

Installing sbt

Please refer to this link for instructions for your operating system.

Installing clang and runtime dependencies

Scala Native requires Clang, which is part of the LLVM toolchain. The recommended LLVM version is 3.7 or newer, however, the Scala Native sbt plugin uses feature detection to discover the installed version of Clang so older versions may also work.

Scala Native uses Boehm garbage collector by default. Both the native library and header files must be provided at build time. One may use opt-in to use new experimental garbage collector called Immix to avoid this dependency.

To be able to use regular expressions, the RE2 library must be installed. You will also need to install zlib if you use classes from the java.util.zip package. If you don’t use regular expressions or compression, you can skip these dependencies.

Note

Some package managers provide the library header files in separate -dev packages.

Here are install instructions for a number of operating systems Scala Native has been used with:

macOS

$ brew install llvm
$ brew install bdw-gc re2 # optional

Note: A version of zlib that is sufficiently recent comes with the installation of macOS.

Ubuntu

$ sudo apt install clang libunwind-dev
$ sudo apt install libgc-dev libre2-dev # optional

Note: libre2-dev is available since Ubuntu 16.04. Please refer to our travis environment setup script to install from source.

Arch Linux

$ sudo pacman -S llvm clang
$ sudo pacman -S gc re2 # optional

Note: A version of zlib that is sufficiently recent comes with the installation of Arch Linux.

Fedora 26

$ sudo dnf install llvm clang
$ sudo dnf install libunwind-devel gc-devel zlib-devel re2-devel # optional

FreeBSD

$ pkg install llvm38 libunwind
$ pkg install boehm-gc re2 # optional

Note: A version of zlib that is sufficiently recent comes with the installation of FreeBSD.

Nix/NixOS

$ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/scala-native/scala-native/master/scripts/scala-native.nix
$ nix-shell scala-native.nix -A clangEnv

Continue to Building projects with sbt.