/c-ward

An implementation of libc written in Rust

Primary LanguageRustOtherNOASSERTION

c-ward

An implementation of libc written in Rust

Github Actions CI Status zulip chat crates.io page crates.io page docs.rs docs docs.rs docs

c-ward is an implementation of the libc ABI written in Rust.

It consists of two crates:

  • c-scape, which is no_std, and
  • c-gull, which pulls in c-scape and additionally provides features using std.

It is a goal of c-ward to be a C ABI layer on top of Rust-idomatic libraries, rather than to have significant implementation code of its own.

In theory c-ward could be extended to be ABI-compatible with different platforms, however currently it is only known to be ABI-compatible with *-unknown-linux-gnu* platforms.

Similar crates

Another libc implementation is relibc.

Where's the #![no_builtins]?

Normally, a libc implementation would use #[no_builtins] to prevent compilers from noticing the the bodies of libc functions implement the semantics of libc functions and replacing them with calls, which effectively makes them uselessly recursive calls to themselves.

However, #[no_builtins] is too pessimistic, because we don't need to disable all pattern matching, just these specific cases. And, #[no_builtins] interferes with LTO optimization.

So instead, c-scape and c-gull are just careful to avoid open-coding functions which are known to get pattern-matched into builtins, by just calling the compiler_builtins implementations directly themselves. This way, we can avoid using #![no_builtins].