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  • Alex Crichton's avatar
    std: Depend directly on crates.io crates · 4c21a3bc
    Alex Crichton authored
    Ever since we added a Cargo-based build system for the compiler the
    standard library has always been a little special, it's never been able
    to depend on crates.io crates for runtime dependencies. This has been a
    result of various limitations, namely that Cargo doesn't understand that
    crates from crates.io depend on libcore, so Cargo tries to build crates
    before libcore is finished.
    
    I had an idea this afternoon, however, which lifts the strategy
    from #52919 to directly depend on crates.io crates from the standard
    library. After all is said and done this removes a whopping three
    submodules that we need to manage!
    
    The basic idea here is that for any crate `std` depends on it adds an
    *optional* dependency on an empty crate on crates.io, in this case named
    `rustc-std-workspace-core`. This crate is overridden via `[patch]` in
    this repository to point to a local crate we write, and *that* has a
    `path` dependency on libcore.
    
    Note that all `no_std` crates also depend on `compiler_builtins`, but if
    we're not using submodules we can publish `compiler_builtins` to
    crates.io and all crates can depend on it anyway! The basic strategy
    then looks like:
    
    * The standard library (or some transitive dep) decides to depend on a
      crate `foo`.
    * The standard library adds
    
      ```toml
      [dependencies]
      foo = { version = "0.1", features = ['rustc-dep-of-std'] }
      ```
    * The crate `foo` has an optional dependency on `rustc-std-workspace-core`
    * The crate `foo` has an optional dependency on `compiler_builtins`
    * The crate `foo` has a feature `rustc-dep-of-std` which activates these
      crates and any other necessary infrastructure in the crate.
    
    A sample commit for `dlmalloc` [turns out to be quite simple][commit].
    After that all `no_std` crates should largely build "as is" and still be
    publishable on crates.io! Notably they should be able to continue to use
    stable Rust if necessary, since the `rename-dependency` feature of Cargo
    is soon stabilizing.
    
    As a proof of concept, this commit removes the `dlmalloc`,
    `libcompiler_builtins`, and `libc` submodules from this repository. Long
    thorns in our side these are now gone for good and we can directly
    depend on crates.io! It's hoped that in the long term we can bring in
    other crates as necessary, but for now this is largely intended to
    simply make it easier to manage these crates and remove submodules.
    
    This should be a transparent non-breaking change for all users, but one
    possible stickler is that this almost for sure breaks out-of-tree
    `std`-building tools like `xargo` and `cargo-xbuild`. I think it should
    be relatively easy to get them working, however, as all that's needed is
    an entry in the `[patch]` section used to build the standard library.
    Hopefully we can work with these tools to solve this problem!
    
    [commit]: https://github.com/alexcrichton/dlmalloc-rs/commit/28ee12db813a3b650a7c25d1c36d2c17dcb88ae3
    4c21a3bc