...from a C programmer.
I have a small side-project which appears to be a good candidate to let me get familiar with Rust. However, schedule is tight and I can't change my programming environment; if I can "shoehorn" Rust compiling and building into my existing "workshop" I can do it, if not I'll have to wait for another opportunity.
All my source code lives in a directory that is read/write only when the code is being editing, when it is compiled, linked and tested it is read-only. Can rust compiler and linker operate in such environment?
In this instance any "version control" automatism is an unwelcome complication. Can I completely by-pass the necessity to deal with it in Rust/Cargo?
While I can do what is necessary to copy required components from the Internet to set up the development environment, while coding and testing I am on a local network only,, without Internet access on the development machine. Is this likely to present a problem?
For a simple statically linked command-line Linux executable, are there any Rust-related run-time files required to be passed on to the user of the program?
Yes, you can set CARGO_TARGET_DIR in the environment (or [build] target-dir in the config file) to tell the build system to put all compiled/generated artifacts in some location outside of the source directory.
The index for the crates.io registry lives in a git repo. Cargo uses libgit2 internally to fetch and update this index. After initially fetching the index, you can use the --offline flag to tell Cargo not to auto-update it when your manifest changes.
The crates.io registry uses GitHub for authentication. If you want to publish packages on this registry, you must have a GitHub account.
There are also a few optional integration points:
The cargo new command will initialize a git repo and create a .gitignore file by default. Use cargo new --vcs none to disable this.
Cargo allows you to use git repos as dependencies. If you don't keep your dependencies in git, you can instead use a package registry or the local filesystem.
Also useful: The rustup doc command will open the locally-installed standard library and toolchain documentation, and the cargo doc --open command will build and then open locally-stored API docs for your own project and all of its dependencies.
In addition to all of the Cargo options @mbrubeck mentioned, it’s also possible to invoke rustc directly. You give up the crates ecosystem, but it behaves like a C compiler: it reads the source code and produces a binary; nothing else.
I have a bunch of C language thread-safe functions (500-800 lines of clean C code) in a library which I must either port to Rust or statically link with the main program. My next step is to decide which of the two options will work better: that C code is now quite stable, operate on concise floting-point and integer structures. There would be no advantage in porting it if including them as a C library in the Rust program presents no problem. Comments are appreciated.
TIA.
