Command Guide

ckc is the command-line program that reads CK files. For a first program, you only need two commands: check asks whether the file is valid, and run starts it. The quick start shows the exact macOS, Linux, and Windows commands.

Start here#

Command	What it does
ckc check file.ck	Checks the file and explains errors without creating another file
ckc run file.ck	Runs the program's main function on your computer

More commands (for later)#

These commands build a program for another use or display technical information about it.

Command	Purpose
ckc build file.ck --kind executable --out app	Build a Native executable
ckc emit-c file.ck --out file.c	Emit C source and header
ckc emit-wat file.ck	Emit readable WebAssembly text
ckc emit-wasm file.ck --out file.wasm	Emit WebAssembly binary
ckc emit-mir file.ck	Inspect a compiler's intermediate view of the program
ckc emit-kir file.ck --print-facts	Inspect the optimizer's view and its facts

emit-llvm prints host-native LLVM IR when the Native toolchain feature is present. ckc --version --verbose reports compiler and backend identities; ckc licenses prints bundled notices.

Important defaults#

• run and build use O3 by default; inspection commands default to O0.
• Arithmetic overflow and slice bounds are unchecked by default.
• build defaults to a dynamic library if --kind is omitted, and uses the portable baseline CPU policy.
• PGO is opt-in through ckc pgo or --pgo-*. Ordinary builds do not train or read a profile.
• --target accepts only the current host target; cross-compilation is not supported.

ckc emit-kir kernel.ck --consumer native-library --cpu baseline -O3 --explain-optimization
ckc build kernel.ck --kind static --cpu multiversion --out libkernel.a

Offline Auto-Tuning is not currently available. ckc tune and ckc build --tune-use report that the feature is unavailable. Consult the full CLI reference for option combinations, cache behavior, and failure categories.