Quickstart

This page gives you the fastest path from a fresh checkout to compiling an .edge contract. For a deeper walkthrough of the internals, see Compiler Architecture.

Install

Install edgeup, the Edge toolchain manager:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/refcell/edge-rs/main/etc/install.sh | sh

Then install the Edge compiler:

edgeup install

edgeup detects your shell (bash, zsh, or fish) and appends the toolchain directory to your PATH automatically. Restart your shell or run the printed source command before continuing.

Supported platforms: Linux x86_64, macOS x86_64, macOS arm64 (Apple Silicon). Windows is not supported.

Compile a contract

Pass a source file directly to edgec to compile it. By default, the compiler prints EVM bytecode as a hex string to stdout.

edgec examples/counter.edge
edgec examples/counter.edge -o counter.bin
edgec -v examples/expressions.edge

Inspect intermediate stages

The compiler can stop after earlier phases of the pipeline using subcommands or the --emit flag:

# Subcommands
edgec lex   examples/counter.edge   # print tokens
edgec parse examples/counter.edge   # print AST
edgec check examples/counter.edge   # type-check only, no output
 
# --emit flag variants
edgec --emit tokens    examples/counter.edge   # lex only
edgec --emit ast       examples/counter.edge   # parse only
edgec --emit ir        examples/counter.edge   # IR (s-expression)
edgec --emit pretty-ir examples/counter.edge   # IR (pretty-printed)
edgec --emit asm       examples/counter.edge   # pre-final assembly
edgec --emit bytecode  examples/counter.edge   # EVM bytecode (default)

ABI output

Passing --emit abi prints the contract ABI as JSON to stdout, compatible with the Ethereum ABI specification. This is useful for generating interface files consumed by frontends, deployment scripts, and other tooling.

edgec --emit abi examples/counter.edge
# [{"type":"function","name":"increment","inputs":[],"outputs":[],"stateMutability":"view"}, ...]

Standard JSON I/O

The edgec standard-json command implements the standard JSON IPC protocol used by Foundry and solc-compatible toolchains. It reads a JSON request from stdin containing source files and compiler settings, compiles every source, and writes a JSON response to stdout with ABI and bytecode fields for each contract. The command always exits 0; compilation errors are reported inside the JSON response rather than as a non-zero exit code. This is the interface that the foundry-compilers crate uses to drive external compilers.

echo '{"language":"Edge","sources":{"counter.edge":{"content":"..."}}}' | edgec standard-json
# {"sources":{"counter.edge":{"id":0}},"contracts":{"counter.edge":{"Counter":{"abi":[...],"evm":{"bytecode":{"object":"604d..."},...}}}}}

Optimization flags

Control the optimization level and target metric:

edgec -O2 examples/counter.edge                        # optimization level 0–3 (default: 0)
edgec --optimize-for size examples/counter.edge        # optimize for bytecode size
edgec --optimize-for gas  examples/counter.edge        # optimize for gas cost (default)

Standard library path

The compiler embeds the Edge standard library at build time. To use a local checkout of the stdlib instead, set --std-path or the EDGE_STD_PATH environment variable:

edgec --std-path ./std examples/counter.edge
EDGE_STD_PATH=./std edgec examples/counter.edge

Language server

Edge ships an LSP server for editor integration. Start it with:

edgec lsp

The server communicates over stdin/stdout and provides parse and type-check diagnostics with precise source spans.

Explore the reference programs

The repository includes a growing set of example contracts under examples/, ranging from small syntax samples to larger token-style contracts.