ionicons-v5-d 1.0.0 (0d91852a)
Updated on 23/05/2026, 10:45:30.

Rust

Note

The API is documented here https://lief.re/doc/stable/rust/lief and the nightly doc is here: https://lief-rs.s3.fr-par.scw.cloud/doc/latest/lief/index.html.

[package]
name    = "my-awesome-project"
version = "0.0.1"
edition = "2024"

[dependencies]
lief = { git = "https://github.com/lief-project/LIEF", branch = "main" }

Warning

LIEF rust bindings are not on docs.rs because of network restrictions: https://github.com/rust-lang/docs.rs/issues/2563

Precompiled FFI Bindings

LIEF’s Rust bindings are split into two parts:

  1. lief: the high-level, idiomatic Rust API.

  2. lief-ffi: the low-level FFI API based on cxx.

Two additional crates support the build process:

  • lief-build: build-script helper used by lief-ffi to fetch the pre-compiled artifacts and emit the cargo link directives.

  • lief-ffigen: standalone CLI that generates the C++ side of the cxx bridge from the #[cxx::bridge] modules declared in lief-ffi.

Building lief-ffi requires generating the C++ bridge files with lief-ffigen and then compiling them alongside libLIEF. Both steps can take several minutes.

To save time, LIEF provides pre-compiled versions of these artifacts, which are downloaded from GitHub (for releases) or an S3 bucket (for nightly builds).

LIEF_RUST_PRECOMPILED

If you need to avoid downloading these pre-compiled files, set LIEF_RUST_PRECOMPILED to point to the directory that contains these files:

/home/romain/out
└── lib
    ├── libLIEF.a
    └── liblief-sys.a

1 directory, 2 files

LIEF_RUST_PRECOMPILED=/home/romain/out cargo build [...]

This variable can also be used when building in offline mode (e.g., cargo --offline).

As of now, the following targets are supported with pre-compilation:

Target

Description

x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu

Regular Linux x86-64 (Ubuntu 19.10, Debian 10, …)

i686-unknown-linux-gnu

Regular Linux i686 (Ubuntu 19.10, Debian 10, …)

x86_64-unknown-linux-musl

Musl target that allows full static build

i686-unknown-linux-musl

Linux i686 with Musl

aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu

Linux aarch64 (Debian 12+)

aarch64-unknown-linux-musl

Linux aarch64 with Musl

aarch64-linux-android

Android aarch64 (API 30+)

x86_64-linux-android

Android x86_64 (API 30+)

x86_64-apple-darwin

macOS 11+ x86-64

aarch64-apple-darwin

macOS 11+ arm64 (Apple Silicon)

aarch64-apple-ios

iOS 12+

x86_64-pc-windows-msvc[MT]

Regular Windows x86-64 (static UCRT runtime)

x86_64-pc-windows-msvc[MD]

Regular Windows x86-64 (dynamic UCRT runtime .dll)

aarch64-pc-windows-msvc[MT]

Regular Windows arm64 (static UCRT runtime)

aarch64-pc-windows-msvc[MD]

Regular Windows arm64 (dynamic UCRT runtime .dll)

Precompilation

The assets of the pre-compiled output are:

  1. LIEF static library: LIEF.{a,lib}

  2. liefsys.{a,lib}: bridge between C++ and Rust

The LIEF static library must be compiled as described in the Compilation section using the CMake option: -DLIEF_RUST_API=ON.

liefsys.{a,lib} is built in two steps. First, generate the C++ bridge files with lief-ffigen:

$ cargo build [--profile release] -p lief-ffigen
$ target/{release,debug}/lief-ffigen \
    --output-dir cxx-bridge/         \
    --source-dir lief-ffi/

Then compile them as a regular CMake-based library:

$ cmake -GNinja                            \
    -S api/rust/cmake-ffi/                 \
    -B cxx-bridge-build/                   \
    -DLIEF_DIR=$INSTALL_DIR/lib/cmake/LIEF \
    -DLIEF_RUST_FFI_SRC=cxx-bridge/        \
    -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=cxx-bridge-out/

$ ninja -C cxx-bridge-build/