A guide to how rustc works and how to contribute to it.
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bors e9b51bd0ec Auto merge of #128320 - saethlin:link-me-maybe, r=compiler-errors
Avoid no-op unlink+link dances in incr comp

Incremental compilation scales quite poorly with the number of CGUs. This PR improves one reason for that.

The incr comp process hard-links all the files from an old session into a new one, then it runs the backend, which may just hard-link the new session files into the output directory. Then codegen hard-links all the output files back to the new session directory.

This PR (perhaps unimaginatively) fixes the silliness that ensues in the last step. The old `link_or_copy` implementation would be passed pairs of paths which are already the same inode, then it would blindly delete the destination and re-create the hard-link that it just deleted. This PR lets us skip both those operations. We don't skip the other two hard-links.

`cargo +stage1 b && touch crates/core/main.rs && strace -cfw -elink,linkat,unlink,unlinkat cargo +stage1 b` before and then after on `ripgrep-13.0.0`:
```
% time     seconds  usecs/call     calls    errors syscall
------ ----------- ----------- --------- --------- ----------------
 52.56    0.024950          25       978       485 unlink
 34.38    0.016318          22       727           linkat
 13.06    0.006200          24       249           unlinkat
------ ----------- ----------- --------- --------- ----------------
100.00    0.047467          24      1954       485 total
```
```
% time     seconds  usecs/call     calls    errors syscall
------ ----------- ----------- --------- --------- ----------------
 42.83    0.014521          57       252           unlink
 38.41    0.013021          26       486           linkat
 18.77    0.006362          25       249           unlinkat
------ ----------- ----------- --------- --------- ----------------
100.00    0.033904          34       987           total
```

This reduces the number of hard-links that are causing perf troubles, noted in https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/64291 and https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/137560
2025-03-21 21:03:49 +00:00
.github/workflows Fix posting message to Zulip 2025-02-25 18:56:14 +01:00
ci Opt into, rather than out of, linkcheck (#2180) 2024-12-30 17:22:22 +08:00
examples Merge from rustc 2025-02-25 21:27:44 +00:00
josh-sync Distinguish between "nothing to pull" and "pull error" in josh-sync 2025-01-30 16:48:39 +01:00
src Disambiguate between wg-llvm and icebreakers-llvm in rustc-dev-guide 2025-03-20 12:40:51 +08:00
.editorconfig Set max line length in `.editorconfig` to 100 (#1788) 2023-09-05 23:24:59 +09:00
.gitattributes .gitattributes: Mark minified javascript as binary to filter greps 2022-10-07 18:34:51 +02:00
.gitignore add josh-sync build dir to gitignore (#2196) 2025-01-06 02:57:03 +08:00
.mailmap add a mailmap 2023-12-17 18:21:38 +01:00
CITATION.cff Add a citation file 2023-02-11 08:41:56 +02:00
CNAME cname (#606) 2020-03-09 18:10:52 -03:00
CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md Fix some links (#1865) 2024-01-28 19:44:41 -03:00
LICENSE-APACHE add code-of-conduct, licensing material, and a README 2018-01-16 16:36:21 -05:00
LICENSE-MIT add code-of-conduct, licensing material, and a README 2018-01-16 16:36:21 -05:00
README.md Document `fetch.prunetags = true` gotcha during rustc-pull 2025-03-13 15:44:23 +08:00
book.toml Save linkcheck cache always 2025-01-08 17:05:11 +01:00
mermaid-init.js add mdbook-mermaid 2022-07-17 23:34:12 +02:00
mermaid.min.js add mdbook-mermaid 2022-07-17 23:34:12 +02:00
rust-version Preparing for merge from rustc 2025-03-18 12:08:16 +08:00
triagebot.toml Add CI workflow for performing rustc-pull 2025-01-11 17:50:07 +01:00

README.md

CI

This is a collaborative effort to build a guide that explains how rustc works. The aim of the guide is to help new contributors get oriented to rustc, as well as to help more experienced folks in figuring out some new part of the compiler that they haven't worked on before.

You can read the latest version of the guide here.

You may also find the rustdocs for the compiler itself useful. Note that these are not intended as a guide; it's recommended that you search for the docs you're looking for instead of reading them top to bottom.

For documentation on developing the standard library, see std-dev-guide.

Contributing to the guide

The guide is useful today, but it has a lot of work still to go.

If you'd like to help improve the guide, we'd love to have you! You can find plenty of issues on the issue tracker. Just post a comment on the issue you would like to work on to make sure that we don't accidentally duplicate work. If you think something is missing, please open an issue about it!

In general, if you don't know how the compiler works, that is not a problem! In that case, what we will do is to schedule a bit of time for you to talk with someone who does know the code, or who wants to pair with you and figure it out. Then you can work on writing up what you learned.

In general, when writing about a particular part of the compiler's code, we recommend that you link to the relevant parts of the rustc rustdocs.

Build Instructions

To build a local static HTML site, install mdbook with:

> cargo install mdbook mdbook-linkcheck2 mdbook-toc mdbook-mermaid

and execute the following command in the root of the repository:

> mdbook build --open

The build files are found in the book/html directory.

We use mdbook-linkcheck2 to validate URLs included in our documentation. Link checking is not run by default locally, though it is in CI. To enable it locally, set the environment variable ENABLE_LINKCHECK=1 like in the following example.

$ ENABLE_LINKCHECK=1 mdbook serve

Table of Contents

We use mdbook-toc to auto-generate TOCs for long sections. You can invoke the preprocessor by including the <!-- toc --> marker at the place where you want the TOC.

Synchronizing josh subtree with rustc

This repository is linked to rust-lang/rust as a josh subtree. You can use the following commands to synchronize the subtree in both directions.

You'll need to install josh-proxy locally via

cargo +stable install josh-proxy --git https://github.com/josh-project/josh --tag r24.10.04

Older versions of josh-proxy may not round trip commits losslessly so it is important to install this exact version.

Pull changes from rust-lang/rust into this repository

  1. Checkout a new branch that will be used to create a PR into rust-lang/rustc-dev-guide
  2. Run the pull command
    $ cargo run --manifest-path josh-sync/Cargo.toml rustc-pull
    
  3. Push the branch to your fork and create a PR into rustc-dev-guide

Push changes from this repository into rust-lang/rust

  1. Run the push command to create a branch named <branch-name> in a rustc fork under the <gh-username> account
    $ cargo run --manifest-path josh-sync/Cargo.toml rustc-push <branch-name> <gh-username>
    
  2. Create a PR from <branch-name> into rust-lang/rust

Minimal git config

For simplicity (ease of implementation purposes), the josh-sync script simply calls out to system git. This means that the git invocation may be influenced by global (or local) git configuration.

You may observe "Nothing to pull" even if you know rustc-pull has something to pull if your global git config sets fetch.prunetags = true (and possibly other configurations may cause unexpected outcomes).

To minimize the likelihood of this happening, you may wish to keep a separate minimal git config that only has [user] entries from global git config, then repoint system git to use the minimal git config instead. E.g.

$ GIT_CONFIG_GLOBAL=/path/to/minimal/gitconfig GIT_CONFIG_SYSTEM='' cargo +stable run --manifest-path josh-sync/Cargo.toml -- rustc-pull