Installation - Difftastic Manual
Description: The official manual for difftastic, the syntactic differ

# Installation

## Installing a binary

Difftastic provides GitHub releases with prebuilt binaries.

Packages are also available on the following platforms.

## Installing from source

### Build Requirements

Difftastic is written in Rust, so you will need Rust installed. I recommend rustup to install Rust. Difftastic requires Rust version 1.56 or later.

You will also need a C++ compiler that supports C++14. If you're using GCC, you need at least version 8.

### Build

You can download and build difftastic on crates.io with Cargo (which is part of Rust).

    $ cargo install difftastic

Difftastic uses the `cc` crate for building C/C++ dependencies. This allows you to use environment variables `CC` and `CXX` to control the compiler used (see the cc docs).

See contributing for instructions on debug builds.