What is this all about?

This repository contains the code for "Building a Rust static analysis tool in a weekend", a blogpost that summarize what I learned while developping cargo-breaking.

More specifically, there are three "compilers" in this repository:

• simple_rustc_wrapper, which explains how Cargo interacts with Rustc,
• bundled_rustc_wrapper, which explains how to use Rustc as a library,
• analysis_compiler, which explains how to actually perform static analysis.

Compiling

Both bundled_rustc_wrapper and analysis_compiler require the nightly toolchain and a few other components to be installed. In order to guarantee future compatibility, we will use nightly toolchain:

$ rustup install nightly
$ rustup component add --toolchain nightly rust-src rustc-dev llvm-tools-preview

Everything can be built with the following command:

$ cargo build

Testing a compiler

In the following commands, substitute <COMPILER> with one of the compilers included in this repository.

First the compiler must be installed:

$ cargo install --path <COMPILER>

The compiler can then be called on any Rust project by setting the RUSTC_WRAPPER environment variable:

$ RUSTC_WRAPPER=<COMPILER> cargo +nightly check

Note that the analysis_compiler also requires the TARGET_CRATE environment variable to be set to the crate on which cargo is currently called. See the blogpost itself for more information.