/rustyforge

Primary LanguageRustOtherNOASSERTION

RustyForge Logo

Rusty Forge

crates.io Build Status

RustyForge is a minimal, fast, and cross-platform build system for C. It’s designed for simplicity and ease of use, with modern features like toml-based configuration, parallel builds, and hash-based caching. Ideal for both beginners and experienced developers looking for a streamlined alternative to Make.

Current Features

  • Parsing the RustyForge.toml configuration file
  • Hash-based caching, to avoid unnecessary compilation (including .h files)
  • Compiling individual .c files to .o files with correct include paths
  • Parallel compilation, for faster builds
  • Linking .o files into the final executable
  • Support for linking and building static (.a) and dynamic (.so/.dll) libraries
  • Cross-platform support (Windows/Linux) with proper handling of paths and executable extensions
  • Uses gcc or clang as the compiler (can either be specified in TOML or with --compiler)

Planned Features

  • Test targets and automated test execution
  • Cross compilation
  • Support for MSCV

CLion Plugin (Planned)

  • Automatically detect and add new source files to the build configuration
  • Show build errors directly in the IDE
  • Facilitate easy maintenance of RustyForge.toml
  • Syntax highlighting and autocomplete for RustyForge.toml

Installation

Run

cargo install rustyforge

Alternative

  1. Clone rustyforge repository
  2. Install Rust toolchain (Rust 1.70 or newer recommended)
  3. Run cargo build --release
  4. Place the binary in your system path or run directly

Quickstart

  • Run rustyforge --version to check whether rustyforge has been installed successfully
  • Run rustyforge --help to see usage
  • Run rustyforge init to create a new rustyforge project
  • Run rustyforge discover to automatically add files and include directories to the RustyForge.toml
  • Run rustyforge build to build the project
  • Run rustyforge run to run your executable

Example Commands

rustyforge init
rustyforge discover
rustyforge build --verbose
rustyforge clean
RustyForge CLI Demo

Example RustyForge.toml

[project]
name = "project-name"
targets = ["bin", "shared", "static"]

[build]
src = ["src/main.c", "src/foo.c"]
include_dirs = ["include"]
output = "lib_or_executable_name"

[dependencies]
libraries = ["bar"]
library_paths = ["libs"]
include_dirs = ["libs/include"]
posix_libraries = ["m", "pthreads"]

Build Benchmark

Planned: Direct comparison with Make and CMake, building sqlite3.

Configuration

  • Target: rustyforge.exe rebuild
  • Runs: 10
  • Every run cleans build artifacts and rebuilds forksta as shared a library and executable
  • Measured with forksta

Performance Summary

Metric Mean Min Max Stddev CV (%)
Real Time 4.059 s 4.020 s 4.117 s 0.029 s 0.72 %
System Time 0.109 s 0.094 s 0.250 s 0.051 s 46.41 %
User Time 0.047 s 0.016 s 0.094 s 0.024 s 52.12 %
Max RSS 8366 KB 8268 KB 8588 KB 91.3 KB 1.09 %
Exit Code 0 (success)

Observations

  • The build completed successfully in all 10 runs.
  • Real-time performance was highly consistent, with <1% variation.
  • Memory usage (RSS) stayed around 8.3 MB across all runs.
  • System/User time shows variability due to process scheduling and background activity.

Contact / Contributing

Feel free to open issues or pull requests for questions, ideas, or contributions

License

This project is licensed under either of

at your option.