An informal guide to reading and working on the rustc compiler.

If you wish to expand on this document, or have a more experienced Rust contributor add anything else to it, please get in touch:

or file a bug:

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues

Your concerns are probably the same as someone else's.

You may also be interested in the Rust Forge, which includes a number of interesting bits of information.

Finally, at the end of this file is a GLOSSARY defining a number of common (and not necessarily obvious!) names that are used in the Rust compiler code. If you see some funky name and you'd like to know what it stands for, check there!

The crates of rustc

Rustc consists of a number of crates, including syntax, rustc, rustc_back, rustc_trans, rustc_driver, and many more. The source for each crate can be found in a directory like src/libXXX, where XXX is the crate name.

(NB. The names and divisions of these crates are not set in stone and may change over time -- for the time being, we tend towards a finer-grained division to help with compilation time, though as incremental improves that may change.)

The dependency structure of these crates is roughly a diamond:

                  rustc_driver
                /      |       \
              /        |         \
            /          |           \
          /            v             \
rustc_trans    rustc_borrowck   ...  rustc_metadata
          \            |            /
            \          |          /
              \        |        /
                \      v      /
                    rustc
                       |
                       v
                    syntax
                    /    \
                  /       \
           syntax_pos  syntax_ext

The rustc_driver crate, at the top of this lattice, is effectively the “main” function for the rust compiler. It doesn't have much “real code”, but instead ties together all of the code defined in the other crates and defines the overall flow of execution. (As we transition more and more to the query model, however, the “flow” of compilation is becoming less centrally defined.)

At the other extreme, the rustc crate defines the common and pervasive data structures that all the rest of the compiler uses (e.g., how to represent types, traits, and the program itself). It also contains some amount of the compiler itself, although that is relatively limited.

Finally, all the crates in the bulge in the middle define the bulk of the compiler -- they all depend on rustc, so that they can make use of the various types defined there, and they export public routines that rustc_driver will invoke as needed (more and more, what these crates export are “query definitions”, but those are covered later on).

Below rustc lie various crates that make up the parser and error reporting mechanism. For historical reasons, these crates do not have the rustc_ prefix, but they are really just as much an internal part of the compiler and not intended to be stable (though they do wind up getting used by some crates in the wild; a practice we hope to gradually phase out).

Each crate has a README.md file that describes, at a high-level, what it contains, and tries to give some kind of explanation (some better than others).

The compiler process

The Rust compiler is in a bit of transition right now. It used to be a purely “pass-based” compiler, where we ran a number of passes over the entire program, and each did a particular check of transformation.

We are gradually replacing this pass-based code with an alternative setup based on on-demand queries. In the query-model, we work backwards, executing a query that expresses our ultimate goal (e.g., “compile this crate”). This query in turn may make other queries (e.g., “get me a list of all modules in the crate”). Those queries make other queries that ultimately bottom out in the base operations, like parsing the input, running the type-checker, and so forth. This on-demand model permits us to do exciting things like only do the minimal amount of work needed to type-check a single function. It also helps with incremental compilation. (For details on defining queries, check out src/librustc/ty/maps/README.md.)

Regardless of the general setup, the basic operations that the compiler must perform are the same. The only thing that changes is whether these operations are invoked front-to-back, or on demand. In order to compile a Rust crate, these are the general steps that we take:

Parsing input
- this processes the .rs files and produces the AST (“abstract syntax tree”)
- the AST is defined in syntax/ast.rs. It is intended to match the lexical syntax of the Rust language quite closely.
Name resolution, macro expansion, and configuration
- once parsing is complete, we process the AST recursively, resolving paths and expanding macros. This same process also processes #[cfg] nodes, and hence may strip things out of the AST as well.
Lowering to HIR
- Once name resolution completes, we convert the AST into the HIR, or “high-level IR”. The HIR is defined in src/librustc/hir/; that module also includes the lowering code.
- The HIR is a lightly desugared variant of the AST. It is more processed than the AST and more suitable for the analyses that follow. It is not required to match the syntax of the Rust language.
- As a simple example, in the AST, we preserve the parentheses that the user wrote, so ((1 + 2) + 3) and 1 + 2 + 3 parse into distinct trees, even though they are equivalent. In the HIR, however, parentheses nodes are removed, and those two expressions are represented in the same way.
Type-checking and subsequent analyses
- An important step in processing the HIR is to perform type checking. This process assigns types to every HIR expression, for example, and also is responsible for resolving some “type-dependent” paths, such as field accesses (x.f -- we can‘t know what field f is being accessed until we know the type of x) and associated type references (T::Item -- we can’t know what type Item is until we know what T is).
- Type checking creates “side-tables” (TypeckTables) that include the types of expressions, the way to resolve methods, and so forth.
- After type-checking, we can do other analyses, such as privacy checking.
Lowering to MIR and post-processing
- Once type-checking is done, we can lower the HIR into MIR (“middle IR”), which is a very desugared version of Rust, well suited to the borrowck but also certain high-level optimizations.
Translation to LLVM and LLVM optimizations
- From MIR, we can produce LLVM IR.
- LLVM then runs its various optimizations, which produces a number of .o files (one for each “codegen unit”).
Linking
- Finally, those .o files are linked together.

Glossary

The compiler uses a number of...idiosyncratic abbreviations and things. This glossary attempts to list them and give you a few pointers for understanding them better.

AST -- the abstract syntax tree produced by the syntax crate; reflects user syntax very closely.
codegen unit -- when we produce LLVM IR, we group the Rust code into a number of codegen units. Each of these units is processed by LLVM independently from one another, enabling parallelism. They are also the unit of incremental re-use.
cx -- we tend to use “cx” as an abbrevation for context. See also tcx, infcx, etc.
DefId -- an index identifying a definition (see librustc/hir/def_id.rs). Uniquely identifies a DefPath.
HIR -- the High-level IR, created by lowering and desugaring the AST. See librustc/hir.
HirId -- identifies a particular node in the HIR by combining a def-id with an “intra-definition offset”.
'gcx -- the lifetime of the global arena (see librustc/ty).
generics -- the set of generic type parameters defined on a type or item
ICE -- internal compiler error. When the compiler crashes.
infcx -- the inference context (see librustc/infer)
MIR -- the Mid-level IR that is created after type-checking for use by borrowck and trans. Defined in the src/librustc/mir/ module, but much of the code that manipulates it is found in src/librustc_mir.
obligation -- something that must be proven by the trait system; see librustc/traits.
local crate -- the crate currently being compiled.
node-id or NodeId -- an index identifying a particular node in the AST or HIR; gradually being phased out and replaced with HirId.
query -- perhaps some sub-computation during compilation; see librustc/maps.
provider -- the function that executes a query; see librustc/maps.
sess -- the compiler session, which stores global data used throughout compilation
side tables -- because the AST and HIR are immutable once created, we often carry extra information about them in the form of hashtables, indexed by the id of a particular node.
span -- a location in the user‘s source code, used for error reporting primarily. These are like a file-name/line-number/column tuple on steroids: they carry a start/end point, and also track macro expansions and compiler desugaring. All while being packed into a few bytes (really, it’s an index into a table). See the Span datatype for more.
substs -- the substitutions for a given generic type or item (e.g., the i32, u32 in HashMap<i32, u32>)
tcx -- the “typing context”, main data structure of the compiler (see librustc/ty).
trans -- the code to translate MIR into LLVM IR.
trait reference -- a trait and values for its type parameters (see librustc/ty).
ty -- the internal representation of a type (see librustc/ty).