Installation

The easiest way to install Pop is to download the ready-to-use archive from the Pop releases page. You do not need Rust, Cargo, LLVM, or the Pop source repository to follow this book.

Pop 0.1.0-rc.3 provides Linux archives for two processor architectures:

Your system	Download
Most Intel and AMD computers	pop-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.zip
64-bit ARM computers	pop-aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu.zip

If you are unsure which one you need, run:

uname -m

Choose the x86-64 archive when the result is x86_64. Choose the AArch64 archive when the result is aarch64.

Download and extract Pop

Download the archive for your computer from the releases page. In a terminal, move to the directory containing the download and extract it. For an x86-64 computer, the commands are:

unzip pop-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.zip
chmod +x pop-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu

For an ARM computer, replace x86_64 with aarch64 in both commands.

The archive also contains the Standard and runtime libraries required when Pop builds a native executable. Keep these files together:

pop-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
libpop_standard.a
libpop_runtime_native.a

The executable has the architecture in its filename. You can rename it to the shorter name used throughout this book:

mv pop-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu pop

On ARM, rename pop-aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu instead.

Put Pop on your PATH

You can run Pop from the extracted directory as ./pop. To use the shorter pop command from any directory, place the executable and its two libraries in a directory on your PATH.

For a personal installation:

mkdir -p ~/.local/lib/pop
mv pop libpop_standard.a libpop_runtime_native.a ~/.local/lib/pop/
mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
ln -s ~/.local/lib/pop/pop ~/.local/bin/pop

Many Linux distributions already include ~/.local/bin on PATH. Check that the shell can find Pop:

pop --help

If the shell says that pop was not found, add this line to the end of ~/.bashrc or the configuration file used by your shell:

export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"

Open a new terminal and try pop --help again. The output should list the check, build, transpile, and run commands.

Optional: verify the download

Each release archive has a matching .sha256 file. Download it beside the archive, then run:

sha256sum --check pop-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.zip.sha256

A successful check prints OK. Use the AArch64 filename if that is the archive you downloaded.

With Pop installed, you are ready to write your first program.