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Installation

You need three things:

  1. A C toolchain (cc, make, cmake, git). hcc is written in C, and at compile time it calls cc to assemble and link your program.
  2. hcc, built from source. There are no prebuilt packages.
  3. SDL2, SDL2_image and OpenGL development libraries, for the window examples and image loading. hello-world, draw-basic and font-text work without them.

1. Dependencies

sudo apt install build-essential cmake git libsdl2-dev libsdl2-image-dev libgl-dev

sudo dnf install gcc make cmake git SDL2-devel SDL2_image-devel mesa-libGL-devel

sudo pacman -S base-devel cmake git sdl2-compat sdl2_image mesa

On current Arch, sdl2-compat provides the SDL2 API on top of SDL3. The examples work with it unchanged.

xcode-select --install
brew install cmake sdl2 sdl2_image

OpenGL ships with macOS as a framework, so there's nothing to install for it. Apple deprecated OpenGL in 2018 but still includes 4.1 core, which is enough for everything here.

In an admin PowerShell:

wsl --install -d Ubuntu

Reboot, open the Ubuntu shell, and follow the Debian/Ubuntu tab. Windows 11 and recent Windows 10 builds include WSLg, which displays Linux GUI windows on your desktop. Run glxinfo -B inside WSL (sudo apt install mesa-utils) to check that OpenGL works.

2. hcc

The build scripts can clone, build and install hcc for you. By default it goes into ~/.local, so you don't need root:

git clone https://github.com/YatoVoid/holyc-graphics-guide.git
cd holyc-graphics-guide
./scripts/build-linux.sh --install-hcc     # or build-macos.sh

This pins hcc to the commit the examples were tested against. Make sure ~/.local/bin is on your PATH:

export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"   # add to ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc
hcc --version

To build hcc by hand, or to understand what the script does, see Build hcc from source.

3. Check everything

./scripts/check.sh

This builds all thirteen examples, checks that each example's --ppm mode draws exactly the image recorded in scripts/checksums.txt (the OpenGL ones only when they run on Mesa's llvmpipe; elsewhere that comparison is skipped), checks the samples beep plays the same way, and starts each window program for three seconds to make sure it doesn't crash. Add --no-gl on machines without a working OpenGL driver.

Next: Quick start.