ionicons-v5-d 0.16.2 (d4900dab)
Updated on 01/01/2025, 15:06:18.

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 = "2021"

[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 in two parts:

  1. lief: the high-level-rust-idiomatic API

  2. lief-ffi: the low-level FFI API generated by autocxx

It turns out that the lief-ffi package can take some time to be compiled (around 1 or 2 minutes) but most of this time is spent for compiling auto-generated C++ code (generated by cxx.rs).

Similarly the .rs file generated by autocxx does not need to be regenerated every time. For a given tag or commit those files can be pre-compiled or pre-generated.

To avoid waiting on tasks that can be pre-computed, LIEF pre-compiles these elements and download them either from Github (for release) or a S3 bucket for nightly builds.

LIEF_RUST_PRECOMPILED

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

/home/romain/out
├── lib
│   ├── libLIEF.a
│   └── liblief-sys.a
└── rs
    └── autocxx-autocxx_ffi-gen.rs

3 directories, 3 files

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

This variable can also be used while building with 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, …)

x86_64-unknown-linux-musl

Musl target that allows full static build

aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu

Linux aarch64 (Debian 12+)

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)

Precompilation

The assets of the pre-compiled output are:

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

  2. liefsys.{a, lib}: C++ part of cxx.rs

  3. autocxx-autocxx_ffi-gen.rs bridge generated by autocxx.

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

liefsys.{a, lib} and autocxx-autocxx_ffi-gen.rs can be generated using the lief-ffigen modules:

$ cd api/rust/cargo
$ cargo build --release -p lief-ffigen
$ ./target/release/lief-ffigen       \
   --output-dir ./out-gen            \
   --lief-dir <path-to-lief-sdk>     \
   --target x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu \
   --host x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu

--lief-dir must point to the install location of the SDK while out-gen/ contains the generated artifacts.