Setup

Ubuntu

The easiest way to install ESBMC on Ubuntu is through our official PPA, which provides releases for automatic installation:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:esbmc/esbmc
sudo apt update
sudo apt install esbmc

This method is recommended for general users and supports Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy) and 24.04 (Noble).

Homebrew (macOS and Linux)

brew install esbmc

This installs esbmc together with its bundled SMT solvers (Z3, Bitwuzla).

GitHub Release

You can also download the latest binary for Linux, Windows or macOS from the releases page, then save and unzip it on your disk.

Once unzipped, read the license before running ESBMC. The distribution is split into two directories:

• bin: the static ESBMC binary;
• license: the ESBMC, Z3 and Boolector licenses.

If you want to use other SMT solvers (e.g. MathSAT, Yices, CVC4), check out the ESBMC source code and follow the Build Guide.

ARM64 builds

esbmc-linux-armv8.zip is the Linux ARM64 (aarch64) build. It is static and self-contained like the x86_64 build, but a few features are unavailable on ARM64. Each is tracked by a GitHub issue; if the issue is closed, the limitation has been lifted and this page is simply out of date.

Solidity needs _BitInt(256) for uint256, above what ARM64 Clang supports.

Solidity and interval analysis are the same on macOS Apple Silicon, which is also ARM64. --32 is not: that build keeps the bundled 32-bit libc, so the --32 tests run there. The two solver gaps are specific to the Linux ARM64 build.

Both Linux assets (x86_64 and ARM64) build against the same LLVM 22, using trimmed prebuilt archives that contain only the static libraries and headers ESBMC’s static link consumes. The aarch64 archive is produced by a reproducible trim script hosted in the esbmc/llvm repository.