There are three ways to build the C2Rust project:

• Using Vagrant.
• Using Docker.
• Manually, as explained below.

The previous two options automatically install all prerequisites during provisioning. You can also provision a macOS or Linux system manually.

• If you are on a Debian-based OS, you can run scripts/provision_deb.sh to do so.

• If you are on macOS, install the Xcode command-line tools (e.g., xcode-select --install) and homebrew first. Then run scripts/provision_mac.sh.

• If you prefer to install dependencies yourself, or are using a non Debian-based Linux OS, our dependencies are as follows:

  • cmake >= 3.9.1
  • dirmngr
  • curl
  • git
  • gnupg2
  • gperf
  • ninja
  • unzip
  • clang 5.0+
  • intercept-build or bear - see why here
  • python-dev
  • python 3.6+
  • python dependencies
  • rustc version
  • rustfmt-preview component for the above rustc version
  • libssl (development library, dependency of the refactoring tool)

The quickest way to build the C2Rust transpiler is with LLVM and clang system libraries (LLVM 6 and 7 are currently supported). If you have libLLVM.so and the libclang libraries (libclangAST.a, libclangTooling.a, etc. or their shared variants) installed, you can build the transpiler with:

$ cd c2rust-transpile
$ cargo build

You can customize the location where the build system will look for LLVM using the following environment variables at compile time:

• LLVM_CONFIG_PATH = Path to the llvm-config tool of the LLVM installation
• LLVM_LIB_DIR = Path to the lib directory of the LLVM installation (not necessary if you use LLVM_CONFIG_PATH)
• LLVM_SYSTEM_LIBS = Additional system libraries LLVM needs to link against (e.g. -lz -lrt -ldl). Not necessary with llvm-config.
• CLANG_PATH = Path to a clang that is the same version as your libclang.so. If this is necessary the build system will return an error message explaining as much.

C2Rust (indirectly) uses the clang-sys crate which can be configured with its own environment variables.

To develop on components that interact with LLVM, we recommend building against a local copy of LLVM. This will ensure that you have debug symbols and IDE integration for both LLVM and C2Rust. However, building C2Rust from source with LLVM takes a while. For a shorter build that links against prebuilt LLVM and clang system libraries, you should be able to cargo build in the c2rust-transpile directory (see the general README).

The following from source full build script has been tested on recent versions of macOS and Ubuntu:

$ ./scripts/build_translator.py

This downloads and builds LLVM under a new top-level folder named build. Use the C2RUST_BUILD_SUFFIX variable to do multiple side-by-side builds against a local copy of LLVM like this:

$ C2RUST_BUILD_SUFFIX=.debug ./scripts/build_translator.py --debug

NOTE: Set C2RUST_BUILD_SUFFIX if building inside and outside of the provided Docker or Vagrant environments from a single C2Rust checkout.

Tests are found in the tests folder. If you build the translator successfully, you should be able to run the tests with:

$ ./scripts/test_translator.py tests

This basically tests that the original C file and translated Rust file produce the same output when compiled and run. More details about tests can be found in the tests folder.