zc-ape (Zen-C Actually Portable Executable) is a distribution of the Zen-C transpiler built as an Actually Portable Executable (APE) using Cosmopolitan Libc. This project aims to bring all advantages of CosmoCC to the Zen-C growing ecosystem, so the produced binaries and compiler itself are runnable on multiple OSes and Archs.

The easiest way to get started is to download zc-boot.com from the Releases page.

# Create a project dir
mkdir my-project
cd my-project

# Download zc-boot.com
curl -L -o zc-boot.com https://github.com/OEvgeny/zc-ape/releases/latest/download/zc-boot.com

# Make it executable
chmod +x zc-boot.com

# Run it (downloads toolchain and sets up environment)
./zc-boot.com

# Build and run the hello world example
usr/bin/make
./out/hello.com

Upon running zc-boot.com does the following

• Sets up usr/bin directory structure
• Downloads cosmocc toolchain
• Downloads zip/unzip utilities as APE binaries
• Downloads pre-built zc.com from this repo releases page
• Extracts example files (hello.zc, Makefile)
• Displays instructions for building your first Zen-C program

Known Issues:

• Some systems may need curl utility available in PATH see #1
• Some systems may need unzip utility available in PATH see #2
• Zen-C plugins are not currently supported in APE builds

After cloning the repository:

git clone https://github.com/OEvgeny/zc-ape.git
# or over SSH:
git clone git@github.com:OEvgeny/zc-ape.git

cd zc-ape

Run the following commands to obtain required tools and perform the build:

./boot-repo.com    # Initialize submodules, download toolchain into ./usr/bin
usr/bin/make       # Build zc.com and zc-boot.com

The build process produces:

• out/bin/zc.com: The Zen-C compiler as an APE binary

  • Includes embedded standard library (std.zc, std/)
  • Can compile Zen-C source files to native executables

• out/bin/zc-boot.com: Bootstrap installer

  • Self-contained setup script for new projects

zc-ape/
├── boot-repo.com          # Repository bootstrapper files
├── zc-ape/                # Zen-C APE entry point wrapper
│   └── zc_entry.c         # 
├── zc-boot/               # Bootstrap project files
│   ├── boot.zc            # 
├── third-party/Zen-C/     # Zen-C transpiler
└── usr/                   # Toolchain installation directory
    └── bin/               # 

To build your own Zen-C programs as APE binaries:

# Use the built zc.com compiler
out/bin/zc.com build --cc usr/bin/cosmocc -o myprogram.com myprogram.zc

# The resulting .com file runs on all platforms
./myprogram.com

• Cosmopolitan Libc: makes C/C++ a build-once run-anywhere language by Justine Tunney
• Cosmocc: C compiler producing APE binaries by Justine Tunney and others (see LEGAL section)
• Zen-C: Modern systems language with C compatibility by z-libs team

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit issues or pull requests.