The Rust Core Library

The Rust Core Library is the dependency-free[^free] foundation of The Rust Standard Library. It is the portable glue between the language and its libraries, defining the intrinsic and primitive building blocks of all Rust code. It links to no upstream libraries, no system libraries, and no libc.

[^free]: Strictly speaking, there are some symbols which are needed but they aren't always necessary.

The core library is minimal: it isn't even aware of heap allocation, nor does it provide concurrency or I/O. These things require platform integration, and this library is platform-agnostic.

How to use the core library

Please note that all of these details are currently not considered stable.

This library is built on the assumption of a few existing symbols:

• memcpy, memcmp, memset - These are core memory routines which are often generated by LLVM. Additionally, this library can make explicit calls to these functions. Their signatures are the same as found in C. These functions are often provided by the system libc, but can also be provided by the rlibc crate.

• rust_begin_panic - This function takes three arguments, a fmt::Arguments, a &'static str, and a u32. These three arguments dictate the panic message, the file at which panic was invoked, and the line. It is up to consumers of this core library to define this panic function; it is only required to never return. This requires a lang attribute named panic_fmt.

• rust_eh_personality - is used by the failure mechanisms of the compiler. This is often mapped to GCC's personality function, but crates which do not trigger a panic can be assured that this function is never called. The lang attribute is called eh_personality.