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https://github.com/rust-lang/rustc-dev-guide

A guide to how rustc works and how to contribute to it.
https://github.com/rust-lang/rustc-dev-guide

compiler contributing rust rustc

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A guide to how rustc works and how to contribute to it.

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[![CI](https://github.com/rust-lang/rustc-dev-guide/actions/workflows/ci.yml/badge.svg)](https://github.com/rust-lang/rustc-dev-guide/actions/workflows/ci.yml)



This is a collaborative effort to build a guide that explains how rustc

works. The aim of the guide is to help new contributors get oriented

to rustc, as well as to help more experienced folks in figuring out

some new part of the compiler that they haven't worked on before.



[You can read the latest version of the guide here.](https://rustc-dev-guide.rust-lang.org/)



You may also find the rustdocs [for the compiler itself][rustdocs] useful.

Note that these are not intended as a guide; it's recommended that you search

for the docs you're looking for instead of reading them top to bottom.



[rustdocs]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/nightly-rustc



For documentation on developing the standard library, see

[`std-dev-guide`](https://std-dev-guide.rust-lang.org/).



### Contributing to the guide



The guide is useful today, but it has a lot of work still to go.



If you'd like to help improve the guide, we'd love to have you! You can find

plenty of issues on the [issue

tracker](https://github.com/rust-lang/rustc-dev-guide/issues). Just post a

comment on the issue you would like to work on to make sure that we don't

accidentally duplicate work. If you think something is missing, please open an

issue about it!



**In general, if you don't know how the compiler works, that is not a

problem!** In that case, what we will do is to schedule a bit of time

for you to talk with someone who **does** know the code, or who wants

to pair with you and figure it out.  Then you can work on writing up

what you learned.



In general, when writing about a particular part of the compiler's code, we

recommend that you link to the relevant parts of the [rustc

rustdocs][rustdocs].



### Build Instructions



To build a local static HTML site, install [`mdbook`](https://github.com/rust-lang/mdBook) with:



```

> cargo install mdbook mdbook-linkcheck mdbook-toc mdbook-mermaid

```



and execute the following command in the root of the repository:



```

> mdbook build --open

```



The build files are found in the `book/html` directory.



### Link Validations



We use `mdbook-linkcheck` to validate URLs included in our documentation.

`linkcheck` will be run automatically when you build with the instructions in the section above.



### Table of Contents



We use `mdbook-toc` to auto-generate TOCs for long sections. You can invoke the preprocessor by

including the `` marker at the place where you want the TOC.



## How to fix toolstate failures



> **NOTE**: Currently, we do not track the rustc-dev-guide toolstate due to

[spurious failures](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/71731),

but we leave these instructions for when we do it again in the future.



1. You will get a ping from the toolstate commit. e.g. https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/rust-toolstate/commit/8ffa0e4c30ac9ba8546b7046e5c4ccc2b96ebdd4



2. The commit contains a link to the PR that caused the breakage. e.g. https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/64321



3. If you go to that PR's thread, there is a post from bors with a link to the CI status: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/64321#issuecomment-529763807



4. Follow the check-actions link to get to the Actions page for that build



5. There will be approximately 1 billion different jobs for the build. They are for different configurations and platforms. The rustc-dev-guide build only runs on the Linux x86_64-gnu-tools job. So click on that job in the list, which is about 60% down in the list.



6. Click the Run build step in the job to get the console log for the step.



7. Click on the log and Ctrl-f to get a search box in the log



8. Search for rustc-dev-guide. This gets you to the place where the links are checked. It is usually ~11K lines into the log.



9. Look at the links in the log near that point in the log



10. Fix those links in the rustc-dev-guide (by making a PR in the rustc-dev-guide repo)



11. Make a PR on the rust-lang/rust repo to update the rustc-dev-guide git submodule in src/docs/rustc-dev-guide.

To make a PR, the following steps are useful.



```bash

# Assuming you already cloned the rust-lang/rust repo and you're in the correct directory

git submodule update --remote src/doc/rustc-dev-guide

git add -u

git commit -m "Update rustc-dev-guide"

# Note that you can use -i, which is short for --incremental, in the following command

./x test --incremental src/doc/rustc-dev-guide # This is optional and should succeed anyway

# Open a PR in rust-lang/rust

```



12. Wait for PR to merge



Voilà!