bygge - Build your project.

What if you could build a Rust project without Cargo[^1]? Bygge can.

bygge [v]. (Danish, Norwegian Bokmål)

1. to build, construct,
2. to craft

(via [Wiktionary])

Why?

I wanted to understand all the work cargo does, without needing to dissect cargo itself. I followed the output of cargo build --verbose and turned that into simple build instructions.

Additionally I've been reading about build systems, such as Ninja and was intrigued to rebuild that. I haven't done that yet, but at least I'm using Ninja.

What it does

bygge create generates a Ninja build configuration (in build.ninja by default), listing all the targets a binary crate depends on, including all crate dependencies. ninja can then take this configuration and assemble the final binary. The result should be about the same as an invocation of cargo build.

What it doesn't

bygge is and never will be an alternative to Cargo.

Cargo is a full-fledged build system, aware of different build targets, allowing to enable features per dependency, easily cross-compile to different targets and run the built programs as well as tests and generate documentation.

bygge ... builds.

Features

• Builds itself
• Builds cargo dependencies as listed in a project's Cargo.toml
• Can build only crates with a single binary target
• Runs on (at least) macOS and Linux
• No support for build.rs files
• No support for linking non-Rust libraries

Requirements

• [Rust]
• [Ninja] v1.10.0

Build bygge

bygge can create a Ninja build configuration to build itself. But first you need a compiled bygge. Use the bundled pre-generated configuration for that:

ninja -f manual.ninja

Then create the default build configuration and build:

build/bygge create build/bygge build

License

bygge is distributed under the terms of both the MIT license and the Apache License (Version 2.0).

See LICENSE-APACHE and LICENSE-MIT for details.