cargo-raze VS pyroscope-rs

The same reason Bazel builds avoid using Cargo when building Rust software, so I'll describe why Bazel would do this:

- Bazel wants to cache remote resources, like each respective crate's source files.

- Bazel then wants to build each crate in a sandbox, and cache the build artifacts

This is an established practice, and Nix wants to drive the build for the same reasons.

See:

- https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_rust

- https://github.com/google/cargo-raze

I can make much more sense of C++ code to ensure that two build systems produce the same effect than I can parse and learn two completely unconnected programming languages deeply enough to do the same. I can unit-test core routines. I can as easily extract core logic into shared (configuration) files etc. The benefit of a standard is not to discourage alternatives but rather to agree on definitive semantics and shared and common needs (that is: in this case needs for interfaces to the compiler/linker). The implementation and general availabilty is just one of the by-product. The ability to do introspection in common terms is maybe the most consequential other product, and this is critical for 'transpiling' to other build systems and writing automated adapters such as the one that bazel is recommend for cargo's dependency management.

Cargo is not that tightly coupled with Rust. You can absolutely use bare rustc, and in fact people do that with other build systems like Bazel.

Interesting, aren't the community-driven crates for these areas satisfactory enough? There's PROST and tonic, and quite well-used. I don't know about Bazel though, but I found this. Feel free to correct me on this subject, I admit I don't know that much about it.

There is a project to generate Bazel BUILD files from Cargo.toml.

A general purpose profiler: https://github.com/pyroscope-io/pyroscope-rs

If someone is interested in this space, feel free to reach me!

I feel some of the OP points. I was working on a profiling agent lately, and one of the issues was running it on multiple platforms (just the four big ones linux/mac-x86/arm) on FFI (because it'll be run directly from python/ruby/etc...) and preferably having the thing just work without having to install or configure any dependencies.

Like OP I hit two walls: libunwind, and linking. For libunwind, I ended up downloading/compiling manually; and for linking there is auditwheel[1]. Although it is a Python tool, I did actually end up using for Ruby (by creating a "fake python package", and then copying the linked dependencies).

It was at that time that I learned about linking for dynamic libraries, patchelf and there is really no single/established tool to do this. I thought there should be something but most people seem to install the dependencies with any certain software. I also found, the hard way, that you still have to deal with gcc/c when working with Rust. It does isolate you from many stuff, but for many things there is no work around.

There is a performance hit to this strategy, however, since shared dynamic libraries will be used by all the running programs that need them; whereas my solution will run its own instance. It made me wonder if wasm will come up with something similar without affecting portability.

Finally, the project is open source and you can browse the code here: https://github.com/pyroscope-io/pyroscope-rs

[1]: https://github.com/pypa/auditwheel

Version 0.5 is now live!: https://github.com/pyroscope-io/pyroscope-rs

Working on https://github.com/pyroscope-io/pyroscope-rs A profiling solution for Rust and other languages.

Thanks to the maintainers at pprof-rs for helping us figure out how we can modify their profiler to create our rust agent (https://github.com/pyroscope-io/pyroscope-rs).