If you just want to install and use DuckDB, please see our website for installation and usage instructions.
For development, DuckDB requires CMake, Python3 and a C++11 compliant compiler. Run make in the root directory to compile the sources. For development, use make debug to build a non-optimized debug version. You should run make unit and make allunit to verify that your version works properly after making changes. To test performance, you can run several standard benchmarks from the root directory by executing ./build/release/benchmark/benchmark_runner.
Please also refer to our Contribution Guide.