Installation
The Lingua Franca toolchain requires Java 17 (download from Oracle). Each target language may have additional requirements (see the Target Language Details page and select your target language).
You can use Lingua Franca:
You can also spin up one of our pre-configured Cloud-based dev environments:
Have a look at the Lingua Franca playground for more details.
Visual Studio Code​
Our Visual Studio Code extension can be installed via the Marketplace or built from source, as detailed below. See the handbook for usage instructions.
Marketplace​
The Lingua Franca extension is available on the Visual Studio Marketplace and the VSX Registry. To install the extension, open VS Code, launch Quick Open (Ctrl + P) and enter:
ext install lf-lang.vscode-lingua-franca
Alternatively, you can run the following command in your terminal:
code --install-extension lf-lang.vscode-lingua-franca
To use the nightly pre-release of the extension instead of the latest release, find the Lingua Franca extension in the Extensions tab and click on the "Switch to Pre-Release Version" button.
From Source​
Please refer to the Lingua Franca VS Code GitHub repository for build instructions.
Epoch IDE​
There are multiple options available for installing Epoch as listed below. See the handbook for usage instructions.
Install Script​
Run the following command in your terminal to install the latest release (on Windows, use WSL):
curl -Ls https://install.lf-lang.org | bash -s epoch
You can also install the nightly pre-release:
curl -Ls https://install.lf-lang.org | bash -s epoch nightly
You can use the --prefix=<path> argument to change the default install location.
The default prefix is /usr/local/bin on a Mac and ~/.local/bin on Linux and WSL. You may not have write access to this directory by default, in which case, if you still want to use the default prefix, you can replace sh with sudo sh in the above commands.
AUR​
There are binary packages available in the Arch user repository, which you can install using your favorite AUR helper. For instance, with yay:
yay -S epoch-bin
or for the nightly pre-release:
yay -S epoch-nightly-bin
Manual Download​
Regular and nightly release builds of Epoch can be downloaded from the Epoch release page. Download the archive that matches your OS and architecture, and extract the contents.
MacOS requires extra steps before being able to execute the app:
xattr -cr Epoch.app
To install, drag the Epoch.app file to your Applications folder. You can then invoke the app as follows:
open -a Epoch.app
From Source​
Please refer to the Epoch GitHub repository for build instructions.
CLI Tools​
There are multiple options available for installing the Lingua Franca compiler and other command line tools, as listed below. See the handbook for usage instructions.
Install Script​
Run the following command in your terminal to install the latest release (on Windows, use WSL):
curl -Ls https://install.lf-lang.org | bash -s cli
You can also install the nightly pre-release:
curl -Ls https://install.lf-lang.org | bash -s cli nightly
You can use the --prefix=<path> argument to change the default install location.
AUR​
There are binary packages available in the Arch user repository, which you can install using your favorite AUR helper. For instance, with yay:
yay -S lf-cli-bin
or for the nightly pre-release:
yay -S lf-cli-nightly-bin
Nix and NixOS​
The Lingua Franca compiler is packaged in nixpkgs and is available via the binary cache.
Run
nix shell nixpkgs#lingua-franca
to temporarily install lfc in your current shell environment.
Manual Download​
Regular and nightly release builds of the command line tools can be downloaded from the Lingua Franca release page. Download the archive that matches your OS and architecture, and extract the contents.
From Source​
Please refer to the Lingua Franca GitHub repository for build instructions.
If you'd like to contribute to Lingua Franca, you can find details about the recommended developer setup here.