Currently the core of radare2 can be compiled on many systems and architectures, but the main development is done on GNU/Linux with GCC, and on MacOS X with clang. Radare is also known to compile on many different systems and architectures (including TCC and SunStudio).
People often want to use radare as a debugger for reverse engineering. Currently, the debugger layer can be used on Windows, GNU/Linux (Intel x86 and x86_64, MIPS, and ARM), FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD (Intel x86 and x86_64). There are plans to support Solaris and MacOS X.
Compared to core, the debugger feature is more restrictive portability-wise. If the debugger has not been ported to your favorite platform, you can disable the debugger layer with the --without-debugger configure script option when compiling radare2.
Note that there are I/O plugins that use GDB, GDB Remote, or Wine as back-ends, and therefore rely on presence of corresponding third-party tools.
To build on a system using ACR/GMAKE (e.g. on *BSD systems):
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr
$ gmake
$ sudo gmake install
There is also a simple script to do this automatically:
$ sys/install.sh
You can build statically radare2 and all the tools with the command:
$ sys/static.sh
Radare2 repository ships a Dockerfile that you can use with Docker.
This dockerfile is also used by Remnux distribution from SANS, and is available on the docker registryhub.
./configure --prefix=/old/r2/prefix/installation
make purge