r-rust/hellorust

Availability of rust/cargo in the R ecosystem

clauswilke opened this issue · 3 comments

I'm seriously considering using Rust for an R package, but before I embark on this project I'd find it helpful if you could provide some clarifications of when and where I can assume cargo is available. I can use the template provided here to create an R package that I can build on my own machine, but can I then also submit this to CRAN? The gifski package is on CRAN, so I assume the answer is "yes", but I haven't been able to find any documentation that affirms this.

Also, related, if rust is generally available, which version(s) can I rely on? And can I assume it's available on all architectures CRAN supports, or only on some?

I obviously cannot speak for CRAN. My experience is that rust / cargo is installed on the cran Linux check servers. The version they use is the one that ships with Fedora / Debian:

The last time I checked, rust was also installed on the Mac builder, but I can't say this for sure because the server was cleaned recently. You would need to ask in r-sig-mac.

I'm quite sure cargo is not available on the cran windows machines. You can easily test this yourself via the public winbuilder: https://win-builder.r-project.org/

As a workaround, for the CRAN version of gifski I am using recompiled binaries from rwinlib.

Thanks for the information! You may want to add this to the README, since it's a major impediment to anybody who isn't in a position to provide recompiled windows binaries for their rust code.

It will get there, we just need to be patient.

Providing precompiled binaries is really easy, you can just store the binaries from an appveyor build of your R package and publish them on any webserver.