Exercise: Compiling software with Rust

In this exercise, you will compile genact, a small command-line application written in Rust. You will use cargo, Rust’s package manager and build system.

Load an available Rust module:

module load Rust/1.91.1-GCCcore-14.2.0

You will need the source code. In this case, you can obtain it from GitHub using git clone. Clone the repository and enter the source directory:

git clone https://github.com/svenstaro/genact.git
cd genact

Select a version, for example v1.5.1:

git switch --detach v1.5.1

Inspect the source directory:

ls

Which files indicate that this is a Rust project using Cargo?

Do you see a Cargo.lock file? If not, you can generate one with:

cargo generate-lockfile

The Cargo.lock file records the exact versions of the dependencies used by the project. This helps with reproducibility if you or a colleague need to rebuild the software later.

Build the software in release mode:

cargo build --release

You can use cargo build --help to inspect the available build options.

Finally, test the resulting executable:

./target/release/genact --help

Note: cargo build --release does not specifically optimize for the CPU architecture of the build node. In general, architecture-specific optimization is possible with:

RUSTFLAGS="-C target-cpu=native" cargo build --release

This may improve performance, but can reduce portability across different CPU types.