rust-g

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

This library is currently used in the /tg/station codebase, and is required for it to run. A pre-compiled DLL version can be found in the repo root of codebases that use it, but you can build your own from this repo (and you should if you're running a server).

Builds can also be found on the releases page but should only be used for Windows, as Linux has compatibility issues across distributions.

Dependencies

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:

   # Clone the `rust-g` repository to a directory of your choice
   git clone https://github.com/tgstation/rust-g.git
   # in the `rust-g` directory...
   cd rust-g
   # Linux
   rustup target add i686-unknown-linux-gnu
   # Windows
   rustup target add i686-pc-windows-msvc

System libraries:

• Ubuntu and Debian users run:

  sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
  sudo apt-get update
  sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev:i386

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

If you want to use the pc-windows-gnu or similar other target ABI, do the following:

1. Change the "rust-analyzer.cargo.target" setting in .cargo/config to i686-pc-windows-gnu.
2. Run git update-index --assume-unchanged .cargo/config, which will tell git to 'ignore' the changes you made.
3. If you find yourself ever wanting to change back, run git update-index --no-assume-unchanged .cargo/config.

Compiling

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

Linux:

export PKG_CONFIG_ALLOW_CROSS=1
cargo build --release --target i686-unknown-linux-gnu
# output: target/i686-unknown-linux-gnu/release/librust_g.so

Windows:

cargo build --release --target i686-pc-windows-msvc
# output: target/i686-pc-windows-msvc/release/rust_g.dll

If you aren't sharing the binary with other people, consider compiling targeting your native cpu for potential performance improvements. You can do this by setting the RUSTFLAGS environment variable to -C target-cpu=native. For example, in Powershell you would use $Env:RUSTFLAGS="-C target-cpu=native".

To get additional features, pass a list to --features, for example --features hash,url. To get all features, pass --features all. To disable the default features, pass --no-default-features. You can't use --all-features because of conflicting native_tls and rustls_tls features to select the mysql backend.

The default features are:

• acreplace: Aho-Corasick string matching and replacement.
• cellularnoise: Function to generate cellular automata-based noise.
• dmi: DMI manipulations which are impossible or degraded from within BYOND. Mostly used by the asset cache subsystem to improve load times.
• file: Faster replacements for file2text and text2file, as well as reading or checking if files exist.
• git: Functions for robustly checking the current git revision.
• http: Asynchronous HTTP(s) client supporting most standard methods.
• json: Function to check JSON validity.
• log: Faster log output.
• noise: 2d Perlin noise.
• sql: Asynchronous MySQL/MariaDB client library.
• time: High-accuracy time measuring.
• toml: TOML parser.
• url: Faster replacements for url_encode and url_decode.

Additional features are:

• batchnoise: Discrete Batched Perlin-like Noise, fast and multi-threaded - sent over once instead of having to query for every tile.
• hash: Faster replacement for md5, support for SHA-1, SHA-256, and SHA-512. Requires OpenSSL on Linux.
• pathfinder: An a* pathfinder used for finding the shortest path in a static node map. Not to be used for a non-static map.
• redis_pubsub: Library for sending and receiving messages through Redis.
• redis_reliablequeue: Library for using a reliable queue pattern through Redis.
• unzip: Function to download a .zip from a URL and unzip it to a directory.
• worleynoise: Function that generates a type of nice looking cellular noise, more expensive than cellularnoise

Regarding rust-analyzer: If you are using a feature set other than the default, you will need to adjust rust-analyzer.cargo.features.

Installing

The rust-g binary (rust_g.dll or librust_g.so) should be placed in the root of your repository next to your .dmb. There are alternative installation locations, but this one is best supported.

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.

rust_g.dm can be configured by creating a rust_g.config.dm. See the comments at the top of rust_g.dm for details.

Troubleshooting

You must build a 32-bit version of the library for it to be compatible with BYOND. Attempting to build a 64-bit version will fail with an explanatory error.

Linux

On Linux systems ldd can be used to check that the relevant runtime libraries are installed, without which BYOND will fail to load rust-g. The following is sample output, but the most important thing is that nothing is listed as "missing".

$ ldd librust_g.so  # Linux
    linux-gate.so.1 (0xf7f8b000)
    libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libgcc_s.so.1 (0xf7957000)
    libpthread.so.0 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libpthread.so.0 (0xf7935000)
    libm.so.6 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libm.so.6 (0xf7831000)
    libdl.so.2 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libdl.so.2 (0xf782b000)
    libc.so.6 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 (0xf7643000)
    /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xf7f8d000)

If BYOND cannot find the shared library, ensure that the directory containing it is included in the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable, or tweak the search logic in rust_g.dm:

$ 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 the Coderbus Discord's #tooling-questions channel.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT license.

See LICENSE for more details.