zanna
// download
The installers exist — they are built and smoke-tested on every platform as part of the normal release machinery. What does not exist is a version worth asking you to install. Zanna is pre-alpha; interfaces change without notice and corners are still rough. When there is a build you should actually run, this page is where it will be.
Source tree v0.2.99 · IL 0.3.0 · most recent tag v0.2.7-dev
// packaged builds
Each of these is a real packaging target that produces a real artifact today. Every one is structurally validated, checksummed with SHA-256 and shipped with a machine-readable manifest before it would ever go out. None of them is published yet.
Apple Silicon (arm64)
.dmg with the toolchain and Zanna Studiox64
x86-64 and arm64
Want to know when this changes? Watch the repository — github.com/zannagames/zanna — or tell us what you would use it for. Neither puts you on a mailing list, because there is not one.
// building it yourself
Building from source is not a fallback here — it is how everyone working on Zanna uses it. There is no dependency-fetch step, because there are no dependencies: you need CMake and a C++20 compiler, and that is the whole list.
$ git clone https://github.com/zannagames/zanna
$ cd zanna
$ ./scripts/build_zanna_mac.sh
$ ./scripts/build_zanna_linux.sh
$ ./scripts/build_zanna_win.ps1
The scripts configure, build, run the test suite and install. When they
finish you have a working zanna:
$ zanna init my-game
$ zanna run my-game
The showcase games live in a separate repository so the compiler
checkout stays small. Clone it beside your zanna checkout and
the full demo suite runs against it; leave it out and those tests report
as skipped rather than quietly disappearing.
$ git clone https://github.com/zannagames/zannademosZanna Studio is a multi-minute native compile on its own. If you are not working on the IDE, skip it:
$ ZANNA_SKIP_STUDIO=1 ./scripts/build_zanna_unix.sh// requirements
| Platform | Architecture | Compiler | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| macOS | arm64 | Apple Clang (Xcode 15+) | Metal is used for GPU rendering. Canonical development platform. |
| Linux | x86-64, arm64 | clang++ 15+ or GCC 12+ | Wayland preferred, X11 fallback, both dependency-free. A headless backend runs with no display server at all. |
| Windows | x64 | MSVC 19.36+ (VS 2022) | Direct3D 11, with a WARP and then software fallback so VMs and Remote Desktop still render. |
CMake 3.20 or newer, and roughly 4 GB of disk for a full build tree. No other dependencies. Not LLVM — the backends are hand-written. Not SDL — the windowing and input layers are Zanna’s. Not libcurl, zlib, FreeType or stb. If Zanna needs something, Zanna implements it, and that is the whole point of the project.
// plainly
It builds and it runs. The test suite is large and green, the VM and the native backends are required to agree on every defined program, and the demos on the games page are real programs you can compile and play today.
It is not stable. Runtime interfaces gain methods and occasionally change shape between commits. There is no compatibility promise, no migration guide, and no long-term support for anything yet. Names have already changed once wholesale — the project was called Viper until this release.
The parts move at different speeds. The IL and the compiler core are the most settled. The 3D runtime and Zanna Studio are the newest and change the most. The 2D runtime sits in between.
Nobody should be shipping on it. If you build it, build it to look around, to read the source, or to help. Not to start a project you need to finish next quarter.
Development happens in the open, daily, in the repository. That is the most useful thing to watch until there is something here to click.