Perry for Termux

A Perry TypeScript compiler that runs natively on Termux — no proot, no chroot. It compiles .ts to a self-contained aarch64 ELF executable with no runtime dependencies.

$ perry --version
perry 0.5.1220
$ perry app.ts -o app && ./app

Perry does not publish a Termux or Android-host build. This repository is the packaging that makes the existing prebuilt compiler usable there. It is not affiliated with upstream.

Install

From a release — download the tarball attached to the latest release, then install:

curl -LO https://github.com/BAIGAOa/perry-termux/releases/latest/download/perry-0.5.1220-aarch64.tar.gz
tar xzf perry-0.5.1220-aarch64.tar.gz
cd perry-termux && bash install.sh
perry --version

From source — the tarball is exactly what build.sh produces, so you can rebuild it yourself:

git clone https://github.com/BAIGAOa/perry-termux
cd perry-termux
./build.sh            # downloads ~110 MB of pinned upstream artifacts
bash install.sh

pkg install clang lld binutils is required for the build and for compiling; curl for the download.

install.sh only creates the symlink $PREFIX/bin/perry. The package is relocatable — the launcher finds the rest relative to itself, so it can live anywhere. Undo with bash install.sh --uninstall.

How it works

Neither off-the-shelf Perry binary runs on Termux as shipped:

• The glibc builds (GitHub releases) need a glibc dynamic loader, which Android does not have.
• The musl builds do run — the compiler is fully static — but Perry's runtime archives are also built against musl, while Termux's own cc targets bionic. The link step then fails on musl-only symbols: bcmp, __errno_location, __xpg_strerror_r, and the _Unwind_* family.

So the package pairs the static musl compiler with a musl linking environment:

Path	What it is
bin/perry.real	Upstream static musl aarch64 compiler, unmodified
bin/perry	Launcher — puts bin/ first on PATH, ensures TMPDIR exists
bin/cc	Link shim that points clang at the musl sysroot instead of bionic
lib/*.a.zst	Perry's runtime archives, zstd-compressed
lib/libperry_ext_http_stubs.a	Symbols upstream does not ship for musl (see below)
musl-sysroot/	Alpine musl libc, crt objects, and static OpenSSL/zlib/zstd

The first perry compile unpacks the runtime archives to ~/.cache/perry/libs/ (~180 MB, once). Perry resolves .a.zst transparently through PERRY_RUNTIME_DIR, and shipping them compressed is what keeps the download at ~85 MB instead of ~230 MB.

Two details are load-bearing:

-static is not optional. Termux has no /lib/ld-musl-aarch64.so.1, so a dynamically linked musl binary would not start. Output executables are fully static — readelf -d app reports no NEEDED entries at all.

The shim is not installed globally. bin/cc lives inside the package's private bin/, which the launcher prepends to PATH for the compiler process only. Installing it as a global cc would shadow Termux's real compiler.

Known limitation: no networking

node:http, node:https, node:net, node:tls, node:ws and fetch() do not work. Programs using them compile and run, but the request fails:

Error: Fetch error: error sending request for url (https://example.com/)

This fails for bare IPs too, so it is not a name-resolution problem — the implementation is genuinely absent.

The cause is a missing archive. Perry splits several surfaces into perry-ext-* crates built as separate libperry_ext_*.a staticlibs that upstream stages next to the compiler. The npm musl package does not include them, and upstream stopped publishing musl packages after 0.5.1220, so there is no musl build to take libperry_ext_http.a from.

That would normally be fatal far beyond networking: importing node:crypto, node:events or node:zlib pulls the same stdlib codegen units, which reference fourteen js_ext_http_* symbols, so the link dies on an undefined js_ext_http_agent_is_handle even though the program never touches HTTP. src/ext_http_stubs.c defines those fourteen symbols as zero-returning stubs — false / NULL / +0, all falsy, so the event loop's "pending HTTP work?" probe answers no and control flow stays on the non-networking paths — and bin/cc appends the resulting archive to every link, where the linker pulls it only if something still has those symbols undefined.

The stubs must not abort: js_http_has_pending is consulted by the event loop of every program linked against the full stdlib.

What works

Classes, generics, async/await, closures, Map/Set, JSON, regex, and these builtins, verified on-device:

Module	Verified
node:fs, node:path, node:os, node:process	read/write, joins, platform info
node:crypto	createHash, randomBytes
node:zlib	gzipSync / gunzipSync
node:events	EventEmitter
node:buffer, node:util, node:url, node:stream, node:assert	import and load

Limitations that are inherent

• Version 0.5.1220, the last release published to npm with a musl artifact. Upstream's current releases are glibc-only, so newer versions are out of reach without building Perry from source — which needs LLVM 22 (Termux has 21) and Rust nightly.
• aarch64 only. The prebuilt binary is aarch64; other Termux architectures are not supported by this package.

Layout

build.sh              assembles bin/, lib/ and musl-sysroot/ from pinned URLs
install.sh            symlinks $PREFIX/bin/perry
src/perry             launcher
src/cc                clang/musl link shim
src/ext_http_stubs.c  the fourteen missing symbols
THIRD_PARTY.md        licenses of everything the release redistributes

bin/, lib/ and musl-sysroot/ are generated and gitignored — a clone has to run build.sh first.