Getting Started

Installation

Pre-built Nightly Binaries

Pre-compiled nightly binaries for Linux (x86_64) are automatically published via GitHub Actions. You can download the latest tarball directly from the Releases page.

Each release includes:

• thorn: The standalone executable binary.
• libthorn_core.a: The pre-built core static library.
• include/: Public C header interfaces.

To install manually:

tar -xzf thorn-x86_64-linux-nightly.tar.gz
sudo install -m 755 thorn /usr/local/bin/thorn

Building From Source

Thorn requires a C99 compiler (cc), GNU make, and vendored pith submodules.

# Clone the repository with submodules
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/abit-foggy/thorn.git
cd thorn

# Build Thorn (outputs to out/thorn)
make

# Run the acceptance and verification suite
make check

Creating Your First Project

A Thorn project is configured with a build.thorn file at the root of the project directory.

Create build.thorn:

engine.project("myapp")
engine.backend("ninja")

engine.add_target("myapp", engine.exe)
engine.add_source("myapp", "src/main.c")
engine.add_source("myapp", "src/util.c")
engine.add_source("myapp", "src/arch/boot.S")
engine.add_include("myapp", "src/include")
engine.add_cflag("myapp", "-O2")
engine.add_cflag("myapp", "-Wall")

Generate build files:

thorn

This generates build.ninja in the current directory. You can then build your application using Ninja or Samurai:

samu
# or
ninja

To generate a Makefile instead, specify --engine make on the command line or configure engine.backend("make") in build.thorn:

thorn --engine make
make