Installation

DEAL is in active pre-release development. The compiler core is a Zig static library (libdeal.a) wrapped by a Rust CLI, so today you install it by building from source. There are no published package-manager releases yet.

Pre-release

Prebuilt binaries and npm / cargo install packages are not available yet. The build-from-source steps below are the supported install path during the current milestone.

Prerequisites

You need two toolchains on your PATH:

• Zig 0.16.0 — builds the compiler core. Install from ziglang.org/download and confirm with zig version (it must report 0.16.0).
• Rust (stable) — builds the CLI, which links the Zig library through a small C ABI. Install via rustup and confirm with cargo --version.

A C linker (the one your platform’s Rust toolchain already uses) and git are also required.

Build the CLI

1. Clone the repository and fetch the spec submodule (the grammar and showcase corpus the tests resolve against):

   git clone https://github.com/deal-lang/deal.git
   cd deal
   git submodule update --init --recursive

2. Build the release binary. Cargo’s build script invokes zig build automatically to produce libdeal.a, then links and compiles the deal CLI — so this one command builds the whole pipeline:

   cargo build --release

   The compiled binary is written to target/release/deal.

3. Put it on your PATH:

   macOS / Linux

   sudo cp target/release/deal /usr/local/bin/

   Windows

   Copy target\release\deal.exe to a directory on your PATH, or add target\release\ to PATH.

Verify the installation

deal --version

You should see deal 0.1.0. Run deal --help to list the available subcommands.

Tip

If cargo build fails with a message about zig build, make sure zig is on your PATH and reports version 0.16.0 — the FFI build script shells out to it.

What the CLI can do today

These subcommands are implemented and exercised by the test suite:

• deal parse — tokenize and parse .deal / .dealx files and emit AST JSON.
• deal check — run semantic and dimensional checks; --verify evaluates requirement criteria against captured evidence, --simulations validates simulation bindings, --run-sims re-runs stale simulations first.
• deal fmt — format files in place (--check to verify, --stdout to preview).
• deal build --target sysml-v2 | reqif — generate SysML v2 JSON or a ReqIF archive (--validate runs offline schema validation).
• deal init — scaffold a new project.
• deal install — resolve deal.toml dependencies and write deal.lock.
• deal simulate — run simulations registered in deal.sims.toml.
• deal evidence — capture and manage verification evidence.

Import pipelines (deal import), documentation generation (deal build --target docs), and the desktop editor are planned for a later phase and are not available yet.

VS Code extension

The DEAL extension provides .deal / .dealx syntax highlighting, bracket matching, comment toggling, a snippet library, and distinct file icons out of the box. When the deal-lsp language server is present it also delivers diagnostics, completion, hover, go-to-definition, formatting, and workspace symbols.

The extension is not on the Marketplace yet, so install it from the vscode-deal repository. See the VS Code Setup guide for full instructions.

Next steps

With the CLI on your PATH, continue to Your First Project to scaffold a model and build it to SysML v2.