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rust-g

rust-g (pronounced rusty-g) is a library which offloads certain expensive or difficult tasks from BYOND.

This library is currently used in the /tg/station codebase, and is required for it to run. A pre-compiled DLL version can be found in the repo root of codebases that use it, but you can build your own from this repo (and you should if you're running a server).

Builds can also be found on the releases page but should only be used for Windows, as Linux has compatibility issues across distributions.

Dependencies

The Rust compiler:

  1. Install the Rust compiler's dependencies (primarily the system linker):

  2. Use the Rust installer, or another Rust installation method, or run the following:

    curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSfo rustup-init.sh
    chmod +x rustup-init.sh
    ./rustup-init.sh
    
  3. Set the default compiler to 32-bit:

    # Clone the `rust-g` repository to a directory of your choice
    git clone https://github.com/tgstation/rust-g.git
    # in the `rust-g` directory...
    cd rust-g
    # Linux
    rustup target add i686-unknown-linux-gnu
    # Windows
    rustup target add i686-pc-windows-msvc
    

System libraries:

If you want to use the pc-windows-gnu or similar other target ABI, do the following:

  1. Change the "rust-analyzer.cargo.target" setting in .cargo/config to i686-pc-windows-gnu.
  2. Run git update-index --assume-unchanged .cargo/config, which will tell git to 'ignore' the changes you made.
  3. If you find yourself ever wanting to change back, run git update-index --no-assume-unchanged .cargo/config.

Compiling

The Cargo tool handles compilation, as well as automatically downloading and compiling all Rust dependencies. The default configuration is suitable for use with the /tg/station codebase. To compile in release mode (recommended for speed):

Linux:

export PKG_CONFIG_ALLOW_CROSS=1
cargo build --release --target i686-unknown-linux-gnu
# output: target/i686-unknown-linux-gnu/release/librust_g.so

Windows:

If you are using Visual Studio Code, you may use the CONTROL + SHIFT + B hotkey and run the rust: cargo build (win32) task.

Alternatively:

cargo build --release --target i686-pc-windows-msvc
# output: target/i686-pc-windows-msvc/release/rust_g.dll

If you aren't sharing the binary with other people, consider compiling targeting your native cpu for potential performance improvements. You can do this by setting the RUSTFLAGS environment variable to -C target-cpu=native. For example, in Powershell you would use $Env:RUSTFLAGS="-C target-cpu=native".

To get additional features, pass a list to --features, for example --features hash,url. To get all features, pass --features all. To disable the default features, pass --no-default-features. You can't use --all-features because of conflicting native_tls and rustls_tls features to select the mysql backend.

The default features are:

Additional features are:

Regarding rust-analyzer: If you are using a feature set other than the default, you will need to adjust rust-analyzer.cargo.features.

Installing

The rust-g binary (rust_g.dll or librust_g.so) should be placed in the root of your repository next to your .dmb. There are alternative installation locations, but this one is best supported.

Compiling will also create the file target/rust_g.dm which contains the DM API of the enabled modules. To use rust-g, copy-paste this file into your project.

rust_g.dm can be configured by creating a rust_g.config.dm. See the comments at the top of rust_g.dm for details.

Troubleshooting

You must build a 32-bit version of the library for it to be compatible with BYOND. Attempting to build a 64-bit version will fail with an explanatory error.

Linux

On Linux systems ldd can be used to check that the relevant runtime libraries are installed, without which BYOND will fail to load rust-g. The following is sample output, but the most important thing is that nothing is listed as "missing".

$ ldd librust_g.so  # Linux
    linux-gate.so.1 (0xf7f8b000)
    libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libgcc_s.so.1 (0xf7957000)
    libpthread.so.0 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libpthread.so.0 (0xf7935000)
    libm.so.6 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libm.so.6 (0xf7831000)
    libdl.so.2 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libdl.so.2 (0xf782b000)
    libc.so.6 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 (0xf7643000)
    /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xf7f8d000)

If BYOND cannot find the shared library, ensure that the directory containing it is included in the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable, or tweak the search logic in rust_g.dm:

$ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path/to/tgstation

To examine what locations BYOND is searching for the shared library, use strace:

$ strace DreamDaemon tgstation.dmb 45000 -trusted -logself 2>&1 | grep 'rust_g'
# Early in output, the file will be listed when BYOND examines every file it can see:
open("rust_g", O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK|O_LARGEFILE|O_DIRECTORY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOTDIR (Not a directory)
# BYOND will then search some common directories...
stat64("/home/game/.byond/bin/rust_g", 0xffef1110) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
stat64("/home/game/.byond/bin/rust_g", 0xffef1190) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
# Then anywhere in LD_LIBRARY_PATH...
open("/home/game/work/ss13/byond/bin/rust_g", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
# Then in several interesting places where ld-linux looks...
open("tls/i686/sse2/cmov/rust_g", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
    ... snip ...
open("cmov/rust_g", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
# Until finding the library fails or succeeds (a value other than -1 indicates success):
open("rust_g", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC)      = 4
# After that it goes back to the scanning from startup.
open("rust_g", O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK|O_LARGEFILE|O_DIRECTORY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOTDIR (Not a directory)

Windows 7

rust-g releases for Windows 7 targets by default and can support building for Windows 7 using the Tier 3 Windows 7 Rust targets. You can build for Windows 7 targets by using nightly and building with cargo +nightly build -Z build-std --target i686-win7-windows-msvc.


If you're still having problems, ask in the Coderbus Discord's #tooling-questions channel.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT license.

See LICENSE for more details.