At present, this is a port of the Ion compiler from C to Ion, derived directly from Per Vognsen's Bitwise project.
- Add the bin dir to your path for convenience.
- Call
bion, which is a wrapper around the ion compiler. It manages some environment for you and even builds the compiler if it doesn't yet exist. - After ion outputs a c file for your project, you need to build the c using your native compiler. Ideally, that gets automated at some point, too.
That should work if you have gcc on Linux or msvc 2017 on Windows.
Older versions of msvc should also work, but you'll have to explicitly bring up an msvc command prompt or environment first. You should also set up a manual environment on Windows if you want to target x86 instead of x64.
See also the Ion motivation document for some of the original goals of Ion. In my own opinion, the non-goals of Ion (such the "no 'best language ever' syndrome") have actually allowed it to be better than some alternatives. It's unbloated. It's pragmatic and serves very well as a better C. It compiles fast and without effort.
This makes it a great core language and potentially a great language to tinker on.
Just my own two cents.