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Don’t Get Burned by Google Carbon

Should you jump in and play with the new programming language, Carbon, from Google or wait?

Erik Engheim
5 min readAug 5, 2022
Photo by Andrey Andreyev on Unsplash

Carbon is the hot new thing, but you might want to think twice before sinking a lot of time into Carbon. This language is in an extremely early stage. There is no actual compiler or toolchain. The language specification is far from done. All we have at the moment is language specification under heavy development and an interpreter of the language called Explorer. The interpreter can run Carbon code by interpreting it. Its other primary purpose is to represent the abstract syntax tree of Carbon code.

If you wish you can install the Explorer by using Homebrew package manager. However that will probably not work on Windows. The Carbon team provides install instructions:

❯ brew install bazelisk

❯ brew install llvm
❯ export PATH="$(brew --prefix llvm)/bin:${PATH}"

❯ git clone https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang
❯ cd carbon-lang
❯ bazel run //explorer -- ./explorer/testdata/print/format_only.carbon

These instructions work for Bourn Again Shell bash and Z Shell zsh , but for those of you who use Fish Shell fish, like me, you would want to export the PATH variable slightly different:

❯ set -x PATH (brew…

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Erik Engheim
Erik Engheim

Written by Erik Engheim

Geek dad, living in Oslo, Norway with passion for UX, Julia programming, science, teaching, reading and writing.

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