rust-g (pronounced rusty-g) is a library which offloads certain expensive or difficult tasks from BYOND.

This library is currently used in the tgstation codebase, and is required for it to run. A pre-compiled DLL version can be found in the repo root, but you can build your own from this repo at your preference.

The Rust compiler:

1. Install the Rust compiler's dependencies (primarily the system linker):

   • Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install gcc-multilib
   • Windows (MSVC): Build Tools for Visual Studio 2017
   • Windows (GNU): No action required

2. Use the Rust installer, or another Rust installation method, or run the following:

   curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSfo rustup-init.sh
   chmod +x rustup-init.sh
   ./rustup-init.sh

3. Set the default compiler to 32-bit:

   # in the `rust-g` directory...
   cd rust-g
   # Linux
   rustup override add stable-i686-unknown-linux-gnu
   # Windows
   rustup override add stable-i686-pc-windows-msvc

OpenSSL (Optional, not required by the default configuration):

• Ubuntu and Debian users run:

  sudo apt-get install libssl-dev:i386 pkg-config:i386

• Other distributions install the appropriate 32-bit development and 32-bit runtime packages.

The cargo tool handles compilation, as well as automatically downloading and compiling all Rust dependencies. The default configuration is suitable for use with the tgstation codebase. To compile in release mode (recommended for speed):

cargo build --release

On Linux, the output will be target/release/librust_g.so, but must be renamed to rust_g to install correctly.

On Windows, the output will be target/release/rust_g.dll.

For more advanced configuration, a list of modules may be passed:

cargo build --release --features dmi,file,log,url

• dmi (default): DMI manipulations which are impossible from within BYOND. Used by the asset cache subsystem to improve load times.
• file: Faster replacements for file2text and text2file.
• hash: Faster replacement for md5, support for SHA-1, SHA-256, and SHA-512. Requires OpenSSL on Linux.
• log (default): Faster log output.
• url: Faster replacements for url_encode and url_decode.

The rust-g binary needs to be copied to either your BYOND bin folder, or to the root of the repository (next to your .dmb).

On Linux, be sure the file is named rust_g.

Compiling will also create the file target/rust_g.dm which contains the DM API of the enabled modules. To use rust-g, copy-paste this file into your project.

It is also possible to automatically override the built-in versions of the functions being replaced. To enable this, create and include rust_g.config.dm in the same directory you placed rust_g.dm, with the contents:

#define RUSTG_OVERRIDE_BUILTINS

The most common mistake is building a 64-bit version of the library, which BYOND will be unable to load. If the output of the file command indicates a 64-bit build, make sure you are using the 32-bit Rust compiler. Correct output for a 32-bit build will look similar to:

$ file rust_g  # Linux
ELF 32-bit LSB shared object, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, BuildID[sha1]=..., with debug_info, not stripped

$ file rust_g.dll  # Windows
PE32 executable (DLL) (GUI) Intel 80386 (stripped to external PDB), for MS Windows

On Linux systems where the hash module is in use, ldd can be used to check that the OpenSSL runtime libraries are installed, without which BYOND will fail to load rust-g. Use the ldd command to check that the dependencies are being found, and no libraries are missing:

$ ldd rust_g  # Linux
        linux-gate.so.1 =>  (0xf7775000)
        libssl.so.1.0.0 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libssl.so.1.0.0 (0xf7677000)
        libcrypto.so.1.0.0 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libcrypto.so.1.0.0 (0xf748a000)
        libdl.so.2 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libdl.so.2 (0xf7485000)
        librt.so.1 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/librt.so.1 (0xf747c000)
        libpthread.so.0 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libpthread.so.0 (0xf745e000)
        libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libgcc_s.so.1 (0xf7441000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 (0xf728b000)
        /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x5657d000)
        libm.so.6 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libm.so.6 (0xf7236000)

If BYOND cannot find the shared library, ensure that the directory containing it is included in the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable:

$ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path/to/tgstation

To examine what locations BYOND is searching for the shared library, use strace:

$ strace DreamDaemon tgstation.dmb 45000 -trusted -logself 2>&1 | grep 'rust_g'
# Early in output, the file will be listed when BYOND examines every file it can see:
open("rust_g", O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK|O_LARGEFILE|O_DIRECTORY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOTDIR (Not a directory)
# BYOND will then search some common directories...
stat64("/home/game/.byond/bin/rust_g", 0xffef1110) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
stat64("/home/game/.byond/bin/rust_g", 0xffef1190) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
# Then anywhere in LD_LIBRARY_PATH...
open("/home/game/work/ss13/byond/bin/rust_g", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
# Then in several interesting places where ld-linux looks...
open("tls/i686/sse2/cmov/rust_g", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
    ... snip ...
open("cmov/rust_g", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
# Until finding the library fails or succeeds (a value other than -1 indicates success):
open("rust_g", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC)      = 4
# After that it goes back to the scanning from startup.
open("rust_g", O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK|O_LARGEFILE|O_DIRECTORY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOTDIR (Not a directory)

If you're still having problems, ask in tgstation's IRC, #coderbus on Rizon.

This project is licensed under the MIT license.

See LICENSE for more details.