Building TinyGo

TinyGo depends on LLVM and libclang, which are both big C++ libraries. It can also optionally use a built-in lld to ease cross compiling. There are two ways these can be linked: dynamically and statically. An install with go install is dynamic linking because it is fast and works almost out of the box on Debian-based systems with the right packages installed.

This guide describes how to statically link TinyGo against LLVM, libclang and lld so that the binary can be easily moved between systems. It also shows how to build a release tarball that includes this binary and all necessary extra files.

Note: this documentation describes how to build a statically linked release tarball. If you want to help with development of TinyGo itself, you should follow the guide located at https://tinygo.org/docs/guides/build/

Dependencies

LLVM, Clang and LLD are quite light on dependencies, requiring only standard build tools to be built. Go is of course necessary to build TinyGo itself.

Go (1.19+)
GNU Make
Standard build tools (gcc/clang)
git
CMake
Ninja

The rest of this guide assumes you're running Linux, but it should be equivalent on a different system like Mac.

Using GNU Make

The static build of TinyGo is driven by GNUmakefile, which provides a help target for quick reference:

% make help
clean                           Remove build directory
fmt                             Reformat source
fmt-check                       Warn if any source needs reformatting
gen-device                      Generate microcontroller-specific sources
llvm-source                     Get LLVM sources
llvm-build                      Build LLVM
tinygo                          Build the TinyGo compiler
lint                            Lint source tree
spell                           Spellcheck source tree

Download the source

The first step is to download the TinyGo sources (use --recursive if you clone the git repository). Then, inside the directory, download the LLVM source:

make llvm-source

You can also store LLVM outside of the TinyGo root directory by setting the LLVM_BUILDDIR, CLANG_SRC and LLD_SRC make variables, but that is not covered by this guide.

Build LLVM, Clang, LLD

Before starting the build, you may want to set the following environment variables to speed up the build. Most Linux distributions ship with GCC as the default compiler, but Clang is significantly faster and uses much less memory while producing binaries that are about as fast.

export CC=clang
export CXX=clang++

The Makefile includes a default configuration that is good for most users. It builds a release version of LLVM (optimized, no asserts) and includes all targets supported by TinyGo:

make llvm-build

This can take over an hour depending on the speed of your system.

Build TinyGo

The last step of course is to build TinyGo itself. This can again be done with make:

make

Verify TinyGo

Try running TinyGo:

./build/tinygo help

Also, make sure the tinygo binary really is statically linked. Check this using ldd (not to be confused with lld):

ldd ./build/tinygo

The result should not contain libclang or libLLVM.

Make a release tarball

Now that we have a working static build, it's time to make a release tarball:

make release

If you did not clone the repository with the --recursive option, you will get errors until you initialize the project submodules:

git submodule update --init

The release tarball is stored in build/release.tar.gz, and can be extracted with the following command (for example in ~/lib):

tar -xvf path/to/release.tar.gz

TinyGo will get extracted to a tinygo directory. You can then call it with:

./tinygo/bin/tinygo

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