2011-10-24
Building Rust
Update 2011-11-08 - The steps to build Rust have changed since I wrote this post, there's now no need to build LLVM - it's included as a submodule in the Rust git repository and will automatically be cloned and built.
A while ago I wrote a quick look at Rust post, describing how to build it and run some simple examples. Since that post the bootstrap compiler has gone away and the rustc compiler, written in Rust, is the compiler to use.
The instructions for building Rust in the wiki are good but I'll briefly go through how I installed things on 64-bit Linux. The first step is to build the required version of LLVM from the LLVM source repository. I use a git mirror and install to a local directory so as not to clash with other programs that use older LLVM versions.
$ git clone git://github.com/earl/llvm-mirror.git
$ cd llvm-mirror
$ git reset --hard 9af578
$ CXX='g++ -m32' CC='gcc -m32' CFLAGS=-m32 CXXFLAGS=-m32 LDFLAGS=-m32 ./configure \
--{build,host,target}=i686-unknown-linux-gnu \
--enable-targets=x86,x86_64,cbe --enable-optimized --prefix=/home/chris/rust
$ make && make install
Note the use of prefix to ensure this custom LLVM build is a local install. I also do a git reset to go to the commit for SVN revision 142082 which is the current version that works with Rust according to the wiki. After installation add the install bin to the PATH and lib to LD_LIBRARY_PATH:
$ export PATH=~/rust/bin:$PATH
$ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=~/rust/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
Next step, clone and build Rust:
$ git clone git://github.com/graydon/rust
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ ../rust/configure
$ make
The build process downloads an existing build for your platform to bootstrap from. It uses this to build a stage1 version of the compiler. This stage1 is used to build a stage2, and that is then used to build a stage3. All the built compilers should work exactly the same if things are working correctly. The compiler can be run within the build directory, or outside it if you put the stage3/bin directory in the path:
$ export PATH=~/path/to/build/stage3/bin:$PATH
$ rustc
error: No input filename given.
Test with a simple 'hello world' program:
$ cat hello.rs
use std;
import std::io::print;
fn main () {
print ("hello\n");
}
$ rustc hello.rs
$ ./hello
hello
