This is a GCC codegen for rustc, which means it can be loaded by the existing rustc frontend, but benefits from GCC: more architectures are supported and GCC's optimizations are used.
Despite its name, libgccjit can be used for ahead-of-time compilation, as is used here.
The primary goal of this project is to be able to compile Rust code on platforms unsupported by LLVM. A secondary goal is to check if using the gcc backend will provide any run-time speed improvement for the programs compiled using rustc.
rustup: Follow the instructions on the official website
DejaGnu: Consider to install DejaGnu which is necessary for running the libgccjit test suite. website
This requires a patched libgccjit in order to work. You need to use my fork of gcc which already includes these patches.
$ cp config.example.toml config.toml
If don't need to test GCC patches you wrote in our GCC fork, then the default configuration should
be all you need. You can update the rustc_codegen_gcc
without worrying about GCC.
If you wrote a patch for GCC and want to test it without this backend, you will need to do a few more things.
To build it (most of these instructions come from here, so don't hesitate to take a look there if you encounter an issue):
$ git clone https://github.com/antoyo/gcc
$ sudo apt install flex libmpfr-dev libgmp-dev libmpc3 libmpc-dev
$ mkdir gcc-build gcc-install
$ cd gcc-build
$ ../gcc/configure \
--enable-host-shared \
--enable-languages=jit \
--enable-checking=release \ # it enables extra checks which allow to find bugs
--disable-bootstrap \
--disable-multilib \
--prefix=$(pwd)/../gcc-install
$ make -j4 # You can replace `4` with another number depending on how many cores you have.
If you want to run libgccjit tests, you will need to also enable the C++ language in the configure
:
--enable-languages=jit,c++
Then to run libgccjit tests:
$ cd gcc # from the `gcc-build` folder
$ make check-jit
# To run one specific test:
$ make check-jit RUNTESTFLAGS="-v -v -v jit.exp=jit.dg/test-asm.cc"
Put the path to your custom build of libgccjit in the file config.toml
.
You now need to set the gcc-path
value in config.toml
with the result of this command:
$ dirname $(readlink -f `find . -name libgccjit.so`)
and to comment the download-gccjit
setting:
gcc-path = "[MY PATH]"
# download-gccjit = true
Then you can run commands like this:
$ ./y.sh prepare # download and patch sysroot src and install hyperfine for benchmarking
$ ./y.sh build --sysroot --release
To run the tests:
$ ./y.sh test --release
You have to run these commands, in the corresponding order:
$ ./y.sh prepare
$ ./y.sh build --sysroot
To check if all is working correctly, run:
$ ./y.sh cargo build --manifest-path tests/hello-world/Cargo.toml
$ CHANNEL="release" $CG_GCCJIT_DIR/y.sh cargo run
If you compiled cg_gccjit in debug mode (aka you didn't pass --release
to ./y.sh test
) you should use CHANNEL="debug"
instead or omit CHANNEL="release"
completely.
To use LTO, you need to set the variable EMBED_LTO_BITCODE=1
in addition to setting lto = "fat"
in the Cargo.toml
.
Failing to set EMBED_LTO_BITCODE
will give you the following error:
error: failed to copy bitcode to object file: No such file or directory (os error 2)
If you want to run rustc
directly, you can do so with:
$ ./y.sh rustc my_crate.rs
You can do the same manually (although we don't recommend it):
$ LIBRARY_PATH="[gcc-path value]" LD_LIBRARY_PATH="[gcc-path value]" rustc +$(cat $CG_GCCJIT_DIR/rust-toolchain | grep 'channel' | cut -d '=' -f 2 | sed 's/"//g' | sed 's/ //g') -Cpanic=abort -Zcodegen-backend=$CG_GCCJIT_DIR/target/release/librustc_codegen_gcc.so --sysroot $CG_GCCJIT_DIR/build_sysroot/sysroot my_crate.rs
- CG_GCCJIT_DUMP_ALL_MODULES: Enables dumping of all compilation modules. When set to "1", a dump is created for each module during compilation and stored in
/tmp/reproducers/
. - CG_GCCJIT_DUMP_MODULE: Enables dumping of a specific module. When set with the module name, e.g.,
CG_GCCJIT_DUMP_MODULE=module_name
, a dump of that specific module is created in/tmp/reproducers/
. - CG_RUSTFLAGS: Send additional flags to rustc. Can be used to build the sysroot without unwinding by setting
CG_RUSTFLAGS=-Cpanic=abort
. - CG_GCCJIT_DUMP_TO_FILE: Dump a C-like representation to /tmp/gccjit_dumps and enable debug info in order to debug this C-like representation.
- CG_GCCJIT_DUMP_RTL: Dumps RTL (Register Transfer Language) for virtual registers.
- CG_GCCJIT_DUMP_RTL_ALL: Dumps all RTL passes.
- CG_GCCJIT_DUMP_TREE_ALL: Dumps all tree (GIMPLE) passes.
- CG_GCCJIT_DUMP_IPA_ALL: Dumps all Interprocedural Analysis (IPA) passes.
- CG_GCCJIT_DUMP_CODE: Dumps the final generated code.
- CG_GCCJIT_DUMP_GIMPLE: Dumps the initial GIMPLE representation.
- CG_GCCJIT_DUMP_EVERYTHING: Enables dumping of all intermediate representations and passes.
- CG_GCCJIT_KEEP_INTERMEDIATES: Keeps intermediate files generated during the compilation process.
- CG_GCCJIT_VERBOSE: Enables verbose output from the GCC driver.
More specific documentation is available in the doc
folder:
- Common errors
- Debugging GCC LTO
- Debugging libgccjit
- Git subtree sync
- List of useful commands
- Send a patch to GCC
While this crate is licensed under a dual Apache/MIT license, it links to libgccjit
which is under the GPLv3+ and thus, the resulting toolchain (rustc + GCC codegen) will need to be released under the GPL license.
However, programs compiled with rustc_codegen_gcc
do not need to be released under a GPL license.