
Change __rust_no_alloc_shim_is_unstable to be a function This fixes a long sequence of issues: 1. A customer reported that building for Arm64EC was broken: #138541 2. This was caused by a bug in my original implementation of Arm64EC support, namely that only functions on Arm64EC need to be decorated with `#` but Rust was decorating statics as well. 3. Once I corrected Rust to only decorate functions, I started linking failures where the linker couldn't find statics exported by dylib dependencies. This was caused by the compiler not marking exported statics in the generated DEF file with `DATA`, thus they were being exported as functions not data. 4. Once I corrected the way that the DEF files were being emitted, the linker started failing saying that it couldn't find `__rust_no_alloc_shim_is_unstable`. This is because the MSVC linker requires the declarations of statics imported from other dylibs to be marked with `dllimport` (whereas it will happily link to functions imported from other dylibs whether they are marked `dllimport` or not). 5. I then made a change to ensure that `__rust_no_alloc_shim_is_unstable` was marked as `dllimport`, but the MSVC linker started emitting warnings that `__rust_no_alloc_shim_is_unstable` was marked as `dllimport` but was declared in an obj file. This is a harmless warning which is a performance hint: anything that's marked `dllimport` must be indirected via an `__imp` symbol so I added a linker arg in the target to suppress the warning. 6. A customer then reported a similar warning when using `lld-link` (<https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/140176#issuecomment-2872448443>). I don't think it was an implementation difference between the two linkers but rather that, depending on the obj that the declaration versus uses of `__rust_no_alloc_shim_is_unstable` landed in we would get different warnings, so I suppressed that warning as well: #140954. 7. Another customer reported that they weren't using the Rust compiler to invoke the linker, thus these warnings were breaking their build: <https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/140176#issuecomment-2881867433>. At that point, my original change was reverted (#141024) leaving Arm64EC broken yet again. Taking a step back, a lot of these linker issues arise from the fact that `__rust_no_alloc_shim_is_unstable` is marked as `extern "Rust"` in the standard library and, therefore, assumed to be a foreign item from a different crate BUT the Rust compiler may choose to generate it either in the current crate, some other crate that will be statically linked in OR some other crate that will by dynamically imported. Worse yet, it is impossible while building a given crate to know if `__rust_no_alloc_shim_is_unstable` will statically linked or dynamically imported: it might be that one of its dependent crates is the one with an allocator kind set and thus that crate (which is compiled later) will decide depending if it has any dylib dependencies or not to import `__rust_no_alloc_shim_is_unstable` or generate it. Thus, there is no way to know if the declaration of `__rust_no_alloc_shim_is_unstable` should be marked with `dllimport` or not. There is a simple fix for all this: there is no reason `__rust_no_alloc_shim_is_unstable` must be a static. It needs to be some symbol that must be linked in; thus, it could easily be a function instead. As a function, there is no need to mark it as `dllimport` when dynamically imported which avoids the entire mess above. There may be a perf hit for changing the `volatile load` to be a `tail call`, so I'm happy to change that part back (although I question what the codegen of a `volatile load` would look like, and if the backend is going to try to use load-acquire semantics). Build with this change applied BEFORE #140176 was reverted to demonstrate that there are no linking issues with either MSVC or MinGW: <https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/actions/runs/15078657205> Incidentally, I fixed `tests/run-make/no-alloc-shim` to work with MSVC as I needed it to be able to test locally (FYI for #128602) r? `@bjorn3` cc `@jieyouxu`
Cranelift codegen backend for rust
The goal of this project is to create an alternative codegen backend for the rust compiler based on Cranelift. This has the potential to improve compilation times in debug mode. If your project doesn't use any of the things listed under "Not yet supported", it should work fine. If not please open an issue.
Download using Rustup
The Cranelift codegen backend is distributed in nightly builds on Linux, macOS and x86_64 Windows. If you want to install it using Rustup, you can do that by running:
$ rustup component add rustc-codegen-cranelift-preview --toolchain nightly
Once it is installed, you can enable it with one of the following approaches:
CARGO_PROFILE_DEV_CODEGEN_BACKEND=cranelift cargo +nightly build -Zcodegen-backend
- Add the following to
.cargo/config.toml
:[unstable] codegen-backend = true [profile.dev] codegen-backend = "cranelift"
- Add the following to
Cargo.toml
:# This line needs to come before anything else in Cargo.toml cargo-features = ["codegen-backend"] [profile.dev] codegen-backend = "cranelift"
Precompiled builds
You can also download a pre-built version from the releases page.
Extract the dist
directory in the archive anywhere you want.
If you want to use cargo clif build
instead of having to specify the full path to the cargo-clif
executable, you can add the bin
subdirectory of the extracted dist
directory to your PATH
.
(tutorial for Windows, and for Linux/MacOS).
Building and testing
If you want to build the backend manually, you can download it from GitHub and build it yourself:
$ git clone https://github.com/rust-lang/rustc_codegen_cranelift
$ cd rustc_codegen_cranelift
$ ./y.sh build
To run the test suite replace the last command with:
$ ./y.sh prepare # only needs to be run the first time
$ ./test.sh
For more docs on how to build and test see build_system/usage.txt or the help message of ./y.sh
.
Platform support
OS \ architecture | x86_64 | AArch64 | Riscv64 | s390x (System-Z) |
---|---|---|---|---|
Linux | ✅ | ✅ | ✅1 | ✅1 |
FreeBSD | ✅1 | ❓ | ❓ | ❓ |
AIX | ❌2 | N/A | N/A | ❌2 |
Other unixes | ❓ | ❓ | ❓ | ❓ |
macOS | ✅ | ✅ | N/A | N/A |
Windows | ✅ | ❌ | N/A | N/A |
✅: Fully supported and tested ❓: Maybe supported, not tested ❌: Not supported at all
Not all targets are available as rustup component for nightly. See notes in the platform support matrix.
Usage
rustc_codegen_cranelift can be used as a near-drop-in replacement for cargo build
or cargo run
for existing projects.
Assuming $cg_clif_dir
is the directory you cloned this repo into and you followed the instructions (y.sh prepare
and y.sh build
or test.sh
).
In the directory with your project (where you can do the usual cargo build
), run:
$ $cg_clif_dir/dist/cargo-clif build
This will build your project with rustc_codegen_cranelift instead of the usual LLVM backend.
For additional ways to use rustc_codegen_cranelift like the JIT mode see usage.md.
Building and testing with changes in rustc code
See rustc_testing.md.
Not yet supported
- SIMD (tracked here,
std::simd
fully works,std::arch
is partially supported) - Unwinding on panics (no cranelift support,
-Cpanic=abort
is enabled by default)
License
Licensed under either of
- Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
- MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)
at your option.
Contribution
Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.
-
Not available as rustup component for nightly. You can build it yourself. ↩︎
-
XCOFF object file format is not supported. ↩︎