Contributing

NX is developed in the open at github.com/nx-lang/nx. Issues and pull requests are welcome.

Building from source

You need:

• Rust, through rustup. The pinned toolchain in rust-toolchain.toml, wasm32-wasip1 target included, installs itself on the first cargo command.
• Node.js 22.18 or later, with pnpm enabled through corepack enable.
• The .NET 10 SDK, only for the .NET binding.

Then, from a clone of the repository:

cargo build --workspace
cargo test --workspace
pnpm install
pnpm -r build
pnpm -r test

pnpm -r build also builds the WebAssembly compiler, which needs clang. The first build downloads a pinned WASI sysroot into .cache/.

The nxlang command-line tool

The CLI isn’t published yet, so run it from your build:

cargo run -p nx-cli -- run examples/nx/hello.nx

nxlang run <file> evaluates the file’s root and prints the value as NX text; --format json prints JSON instead. nxlang codegen emits TypeScript, JavaScript or NX IR, and nxlang typegen emits type definitions for another language. nxlang --help lists the rest.

The VS Code extension

The extension lives in src/vscode, outside the pnpm workspace. To run it from source in a VS Code development host:

cd src/vscode
pnpm install --frozen-lockfile
pnpm run vscode:launch

pnpm run package:verify builds a .vsix you can install with Extensions: Install from VSIX. src/vscode/CONTRIBUTING.md has the details, including packaging and releasing.

This site

The website is an Astro Starlight project in sites/website, and its pages are the Markdown files under src/content/docs/:

pnpm --filter @nx-lang/website dev

Every nx code block on the site is compiled by pnpm --filter @nx-lang/website test, which CI runs on every pull request. A block must compile on its own, unless its fence says otherwise:

• ```nx fragment builds on names declared elsewhere on the page, so it’s checked for syntax only.
• ```nx invalid shows a form NX rejects, so it must produce at least one error.

The build also fails on a link to a page or heading that doesn’t exist.