cc-rs VS RIIR

It does support calling into other compilers and toolchains through build scripts and such. Take cc-rs[0] for example: this allows building C and C++ files natively without even calling an executable yourself.

In practice, I'd expect libraries to just call make/cmake/ninja for you, or (like openssl-sys) ask you to install the necessary libraries using your favourite package manager.

[0]: https://github.com/rust-lang/cc-rs

The cc crate (https://github.com/rust-lang/cc-rs) is widely used for compiling C code from Rust (often in a build.rs file for the purpose of wrapping a C library so that it can be used from Rust). However, I believe it generally does expect a C compiler to be present.

It might be quite tedious to compile static library manually every time we make changes in C code. The better solution is to instead utilize the cc crate, which provides an idiomatic Rust interface to the compiler provided by the host.

https://github.com/alexcrichton/cc-rs This crates lets you shell out to a C compiler when building your Rust project

> You're splitting hairs in a weird way. rustc cannot compile C code. zig can.

But why do I care? I don't use rustc directly, the build system of choice does. And very few of the major build systems have an issue handling multiple languages.

Cargo (rust's build system) supports build scripts and the community has already created C/C++ compiler hooks such as https://github.com/alexcrichton/cc-rs

rustup and cargo also provide easy cross-compilation support, too.

I think it's getting confused because link.exe is in your PATH. But it's not the link.exe it expects. Link tools are detected using the cc crate so it would need to be fixed there. Would you be willing to open an issue about this?

It’s not super well-documented, but there is an option to change this. --remap-path-prefix $(pwd)= in your RUSTFLAGS will usually do the trick. If you have any C dependencies you’ll also need similar things in CFLAGS, see https://github.com/alexcrichton/cc-rs/issues/593

It was, imo, inflated by the comments pointing to the RiiR sentiments, not the comments to that effect itself. Even repositories 'collecting' such instances (e.g. https://github.com/ansuz/RIIR) are largely not collections of making anyone to change their own software but just projects that happen to be written in Rust. (these out-of-scope issues are not being tagged appropriately). Overhyped controversy by all sides.

Dunno what news you have missed but there's entire internet brigades dedicated sorely to spam projects with "rewrite it in rust". There's even a repo documenting this.

The OP post in the link references https://transitiontech.ca/random/RIIR (Rewrite it in Rust) as a meme.

Yes, one can hope, but I wouldn't bet on it and I wouldn't suggest to RIIR. I don't want to be that person that pops up uncalled for and asks to Rewrite It In Rust. One might think "Oh it is just one additional issue to the ~2.2k already opened mypy issues" if they have at all realized that there are that many open issues.

It's died down a bit now, but there is/was a non-trivial amount of stupidity from Rust advocates whenever someone ran into a memory problem with C/C++ to "re-write it in rust" or to just rewrite things in general. (IE https://transitiontech.ca/random/RIIR)

Or even better, RIIR the Windows kernel!

What is it with people asking for rust rewrites of Xorg this week? https://github.com/ansuz/RIIR/issues/83

The second language is Rust, and I went with that partly because rewriting C in Rust is a meme in itself, and in part because it was much easier to think of how to nicely fix that bug in Rust than it was in C (just add a = to the range to be end-inclusive).