Rusty Forge

RustyForge is a minimal, fast, and cross-platform build system for C. It’s designed for simplicity and ease of use, with modern features like toml-based configuration, parallel builds, and hash-based caching. Ideal for both beginners and experienced developers looking for a streamlined alternative to Make.

Current Features

• Parsing the RustyForge.toml configuration file
• Hash-based caching, to avoid unnecessary compilation (including .h files)
• Compiling individual .c files to .o files with correct include paths
• Parallel compilation, for faster builds
• Linking .o files into the final executable
• Support for linking and building static (.a) and dynamic (.so/.dll) libraries
• Cross-platform support (Windows/Linux) with proper handling of paths and executable extensions
• Uses gcc or clang as the compiler (can either be specified in TOML or with --compiler)

Planned Features

• Test targets and automated test execution
• Cross compilation
• Support for MSCV

CLion Plugin (Planned)

• Automatically detect and add new source files to the build configuration
• Show build errors directly in the IDE
• Facilitate easy maintenance of RustyForge.toml
• Syntax highlighting and autocomplete for RustyForge.toml

Installation

Run

cargo install rustyforge

Alternative

1. Clone rustyforge repository
2. Install Rust toolchain (Rust 1.70 or newer recommended)
3. Run cargo build --release
4. Place the binary in your system path or run directly

Quickstart

• Run rustyforge --version to check whether rustyforge has been installed successfully
• Run rustyforge --help to see usage
• Run rustyforge init to create a new rustyforge project
• Run rustyforge discover to automatically add files and include directories to the RustyForge.toml
• Run rustyforge build to build the project
• Run rustyforge run to run your executable

Example Commands

rustyforge init
rustyforge discover
rustyforge build --verbose
rustyforge clean

Example RustyForge.toml

[project]
name = "project-name"
targets = ["bin", "shared", "static"]

[build]
src = ["src/main.c", "src/foo.c"]
include_dirs = ["include"]
output = "lib_or_executable_name"

[dependencies]
libraries = ["bar"]
library_paths = ["libs"]
include_dirs = ["libs/include"]
posix_libraries = ["m", "pthreads"]

Build Benchmark

Planned: Direct comparison with Make and CMake, building sqlite3.

Configuration

• Target: rustyforge.exe rebuild
• Runs: 10
• Every run cleans build artifacts and rebuilds forksta as shared a library and executable
• Measured with forksta

Performance Summary

Observations

• The build completed successfully in all 10 runs.
• Real-time performance was highly consistent, with <1% variation.
• Memory usage (RSS) stayed around 8.3 MB across all runs.
• System/User time shows variability due to process scheduling and background activity.

Contact / Contributing

Feel free to open issues or pull requests for questions, ideas, or contributions

License

This project is licensed under either of

• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or https://opensource.org/license/MIT)
• Apache license, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE or https://www.apache.org/license/LICENSE-2.0)

at your option.