rust/README.rst
author Georges Racinet <gracinet@anybox.fr>
Thu, 27 Sep 2018 17:03:16 +0200
changeset 40271 dbc28c91f7ff
parent 35569 964212780daf
child 44114 8a3b045d9086
permissions -rw-r--r--
rust: pure Rust lazyancestors iterator This is the first of a patch series aiming to provide an alternative implementation in the Rust programming language of the _lazyancestorsiter from the ancestor module. This iterator has been brought to our attention by the people at Octobus, as a potential good candidate for incremental "oxydation" (rewriting in Rust), because it has shown performance issues lately and it merely deals with ints (revision numbers) obtained by calling the index, whih should be directly callable from Rust code, being itself implemented as a C extension. The idea behind this series is to provide a minimal example of Rust code collaborating with existing C and Python code. To open the way to gradually rewriting more of Mercurial's Python code in Rust, without being forced to pay a large initial cost of rewriting the existing fast core into Rust. This patch does not introduce any bindings to other Mercurial code yet. Instead, it introduces the necessary abstractions to address the problem independently, and unit-test it. Since this is the first use of Rust as a Python module within Mercurial, the hg-core crate gets created within this patch. See its Cargo.toml for more details. Someone with a rustc/cargo installation may chdir into rust/hg-core and run the tests by issuing: cargo test --lib The algorithm is a bit simplified (see details in docstrings), and at its simplest becomes rather trivial, showcasing that Rust has batteries included too: BinaryHeap, the Rust analog of Python's heapq does actually all the work. The implementation can be further optimized and probably be made more idiomatic Rust.

===================
Mercurial Rust Code
===================

This directory contains various Rust code for the Mercurial project.

The top-level ``Cargo.toml`` file defines a workspace containing
all primary Mercurial crates.

Building
========

To build the Rust components::

   $ cargo build

If you prefer a non-debug / release configuration::

   $ cargo build --release

Features
--------

The following Cargo features are available:

localdev (default)
   Produce files that work with an in-source-tree build.

   In this mode, the build finds and uses a ``python2.7`` binary from
   ``PATH``. The ``hg`` binary assumes it runs from ``rust/target/<target>hg``
   and it finds Mercurial files at ``dirname($0)/../../../``.

Build Mechanism
---------------

The produced ``hg`` binary is *bound* to a CPython installation. The
binary links against and loads a CPython library that is discovered
at build time (by a ``build.rs`` Cargo build script). The Python
standard library defined by this CPython installation is also used.

Finding the appropriate CPython installation to use is done by
the ``python27-sys`` crate's ``build.rs``. Its search order is::

1. ``PYTHON_SYS_EXECUTABLE`` environment variable.
2. ``python`` executable on ``PATH``
3. ``python2`` executable on ``PATH``
4. ``python2.7`` executable on ``PATH``

Additional verification of the found Python will be performed by our
``build.rs`` to ensure it meets Mercurial's requirements.

Details about the build-time configured Python are built into the
produced ``hg`` binary. This means that a built ``hg`` binary is only
suitable for a specific, well-defined role. These roles are controlled
by Cargo features (see above).

Running
=======

The ``hgcli`` crate produces an ``hg`` binary. You can run this binary
via ``cargo run``::

   $ cargo run --manifest-path hgcli/Cargo.toml

Or directly::

   $ target/debug/hg
   $ target/release/hg

You can also run the test harness with this binary::

   $ ./run-tests.py --with-hg ../rust/target/debug/hg

.. note::

   Integration with the test harness is still preliminary. Remember to
   ``cargo build`` after changes because the test harness doesn't yet
   automatically build Rust code.