What is a Rust systest? - rust

I sometimes see that a Rust crate has a folder called systest. I guess that the name stands for "system test", but I can't find any documentation of this.
My questions are:
What is the purpose of a systest? Just testing that a crate compiles fine, or also testing that some code in another crate runs fine?
What are the rules to follow when writing a systest? Is it just a crate in a folder called systest?
Why does the lib.rs in systest/src seem to always include a file all.rs generated from build.rs?

systest is not a standard name used in Rust or Cargo. However, it is the name suggested by the documentation for ctest, which performs automated testing for FFI bindings. build.rs uses ctest to generate the all.rs file which contains the tests, and this is included from the main file.
According to the documentation, the tests generate include ensuring that all function signatures, constant values, struct layout/alignment, type size/alignment, etc., all match their C equivalent.

Related

Is it possible to have example-specific build.rs file?

In my library I have few examples -- (normally) each one is represented by a single x<N>.rs file living in examples directory.
One example uses a .proto file -- this file needs to be compiled during build (of said example) and it's generated output is used by example itself.
I've tried this in my Cargo.toml:
[[example]]
name = "x1"
path = "examples/x1/main.rs"
build = "examples/x1/build.rs"
but build key gets ignored when I run cargo build --example x1
Is it possible to have example-specific build.rs file?
If not -- what is the correct way to deal with this situation?
Edit: I ended up processing that .proto file in crate's build.rs (even though it is not required to build that crate) and using artefacts in the example like this:
pub mod my_proto {
include!(concat!(env!("OUT_DIR"), "/my_proto.rs"));
}
This is not possible. This issue explains why, but in a nutshell build scripts are used for whole crate. So you could move your example into separate crate.

Why duplicate function names in mod.rs as another .rs file?

For example, have module within /xyz/ sub-directory. Inside the directory are two files, mod.rs and network.rs say.
Why do mod.rs and network.rs have the same function names, but different code within the functions? Is there any reason for this? I thought mod.rs was just basically a defintions file to declare a module, and specify which other .rs files within the sub-directory should be treated as their own creates / modules.
Any help?
It sounds like you are referring to a design decision made by a specific crate. You are correct in assuming there is no special consideration given by the compiler to function/type/ident names in separate files/modules.
That being said it seems likely that what you are referring to might be using conditional compilation. Conditional compilation lets the compiler decide if a given piece of code is compiled or not. You will usually see this used to handle which implementation of a function is used when compiling code on different operating systems since it is often it too inefficient or simply impossible to check at runtime. Some library authors might also decide to add an implementation that it can fallback to instead of throwing a hard error.
Here is a quick example of why xyz might want to have 3 different implementations of foobar.
// xyz/mod.rs
mod windows;
mod unix;
// If this crate is compiled on windows re-export the contents of windows.rs
#[cfg(windows)]
pub use windows::*;
// If this crate is compiled on unix/linux re-export the contents of unix.rs
#[cfg(unix)]
pub use unix::*;
// If not on either windows or unix provide a default implementation to use instead
#[cfg(not(any(windows, unix)))]
pub fn foobar() -> i32 {
panic!("This function is unsupported on the current os")
}

Setting the include path with bindgen

I'm writing a Rust interface to a small C library, which has headers spread in a few locations. It's not a system library, and is normally used by some executables in the same package; I'm currently including it as a git submodule in my Cargo project.
Building the library seems to be pretty easy; I've opted to use the gcc crate from build.rs:
gcc::Config::new()
.file("external/foo/dir1/file1.c")
.file("external/foo/dir2/file2.c")
.include("external/foo/dir1/")
.include("external/foo/dir2/")
.include("external/foo/config_a/")
.compile("libfoo.a");
Now I was hoping to use the bindgen crate to generate the FFI interface without too much fuss, but it doesn't seem to have a way of setting include paths.
I can create a wrapper.h as suggested by this blog and include several headers, but if dir1/dir1.h includes conf.h directly, which works when building due to .include("external/foo/config_a/") it can't be found.
I can't find anything in bindgen's API to help here (essentially I want to pass the equivalent of gcc/clang's -I option). Am I missing anything?
The best option I can think of so far is to copy the various headers from the library source into some temporary directory in build.rs and run bindgen on that, but that seems somewhat messy if there's a nicer way.
With the API you can use Builder::clang_arg with arbitrary arguments:
let b = bindgen::builder().header("foo.h").clang_arg("-I/path");
From the command line you can do the same by appending arguments after --, like:
bindgen foo.h -- -I/path

Testing a Rust crate outside of the source package

I have created my Rust crate. It's a very trivial affair. It built fine and when tested within it's own source directory works just fine (I just included extern crate my_first_crate; in my test file).
I want to now test the crate in a totally different application.
If I add the same extern crate line to my new application, the compiler tells me that it can't find the crate. I expected this (I'd get the same in C if I told the compiler to link to a library it has no clue about!)
Do I need to copy the my_first_crate.rlib file from the source to the application target/debug folder or is there a way to tell cargo that it needs to link to the rlib file?
You need to add your crate as a dependency for your application. Add this to your application's Cargo.toml:
[dependencies]
my_first_crate = { path = "/path/to/crate" }
"/path/to/crate" is the path to the root of the crate's source (i.e. the directory that contains its Cargo.toml). You can use either a relative or an absolute path (but avoid absolute paths if you intend on publishing your code!).

Multiple Rust source files for cargo

If I have multiple .rs files in the src directory of a Cargo package, what are the rules for visibility, importing, etc.?
Currently, any extra (i.e. not the file that is explicitly identified as the source for the executable in Cargo.toml) files are ignored.
What do I need to do to fix this?
There is nothing special about Cargo at all in this way. It’s all the perfectly normal Rust module system. If Cargo will be compiling src/lib.rs, that’s more or less equivalent to having executed rustc --crate-type lib src/lib.rs (there are more command line arguments in practice, but that’s the basics of it).
Other files are then used with mod, use and so forth. Files are not automatically imported or anything like that. This part is not documented very clearly yet; a couple of things that show briefly how to achieve things are http://rustbyexample.com/mod/split.html and http://doc.rust-lang.org/reference.html#modules, but any non-trivial code base will use them and so you can pick just about any code base to look at for examples.
It's hard to say what you're getting tripped up on from the info you shared. Here are three seemingly trivial things that I still had to refer to the documentaton to figure out:
First of all,
mod foo;
looks like a declaration, but it without arguments it is actually something like an include. So you use the same keyword both for declaring and including modules, i.e. there is no using:: keyword.
Second, modules themselves can be public or private. If you didn't add a pub keyword both on the function in question AND on the containing module, that may be tripping you up.
pub mod foo {pub fn bar();}
Third, there seems to be an implicit module added at the top of every file. This is confusing; the reference manual talks about a strict separation between file paths and names, and the module paths in your code, but that abstraction seems to be leaky here.
Note, Rust is still pre-1.0 (0.12) at the time of writing, at the module system and file paths are relatively high level, so don't be surprised if what I said may already wrong by the time you read this.
Files are implicitly included from your rust code.
For instance, if a file src/foo.rs pointed by path in a [lib] or [[bin]] section of your Cargo.toml contains:
mod bar;
It tells cargo to build src/bar.rs too, and include it.

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