Custom targets in Rust

December 29, 2020 3 minute read

I'm going to try a new style of blog post for this one, more of a lab notebook style. Expect normal posts for more interesting topics than fixing build systems.

ISSUE: workspaces interact very poorly with targets

BUGS:

You can't make Cargo use a separate target per workspace crate. Thus, workspace wide builds like cargo b --workspace from the workspace root basically don't work. Thus, put default-members = [] in the virtual manifest to stop those doing anything at all.

Workspace wide documentation also doesn't work, so use -p PACKAGENAME with cargo doc which will document PACKAGENAME and all its dependencies, including transitive dependencies. This is very likely to actually build if the normal build works.

ISSUE: RUST_TARGET_PATH

BUGS

This one was actually,,, attempted to be fixed, but the xargo PR got lost for a year in 2018 and got abandoned.

Thus you should use cargo -Z build-std instead of any of xargo or cargo-xbuild, per the instructions in the cargo-xbuild README.

In particular, to not use xargo and not have to use RUST_TARGET_PATH:

cargo build -Z build-std=core,compiler_builtins -Z build-std-features=compiler-builtins-mem --release --target ../riscv64imac-mu-kern-elf.json

ISSUE: documentation for target spec files

This page wrongly suggests xargo which is outdated.

Some of the options are documented on codegen-options but not really,

I just stole most of mine out of SunriseOS.

There's some WEIRD caching going on with this, and you probably want to wipe target for each build while messing with this file.

ISSUE: how do you even get a target spec file?

# Get a starting point for a target spec
rustc +nightly -Zunstable-options --print target-spec-json --target riscv64imac-unknown-none-elf > ../riscv64imac-unknown-mukern-elf.json

# Check if the target spec is round tripping properly
RUST_TARGET_PATH=$(realpath ..) rustc --target riscv64imac-unknown-mukern-elf -Z unstable-options --print target-spec-json

ISSUE: debugging cargo check issues in rust-analyzer

Put this incantation in a shell startup file such that it ends up in your RA process's environment (🙃). I wish it was configurable in VSCode somewhere.

export RA_LOG='rust_analyzer=info,salsa=error,flycheck=debug'

The RA logs have useful config information, the salsa logs are extremely spammy, and flycheck is the cargo check module. Its docs are here.