cargo's evil twin to work with projects in the twilight zone of WSL2

Motivation

The gist of the issue is the following:

You work with both Windows and WSL2. Your repositories live on a NTFS partition. Therefore the compilation performance within WSL2 will suffer, because the files have to cross the VM/file system boundaries.

Slightly more elaborate background and reasoning can be found in my article on how to speed up Rust compilation.

Solution

One approach is to copy the files into a location within WSL which is a Linux based filesystem (like ext4) and do the compilation from there. Optionally you need to copy the artifacts back to the origin.

wargo does that as a wrapper around cargo:

• copy the project into a Linux location
• run the provided cargo command
• copy back the artifacts

Currently it does this in a very simple and naive way; workspaces should work out of the box, but mostly I use single package projects. Also tweaks with the target folder may or may not work properly, the defaults are usually fine for me anyway.

There are some optional features possible, but current state is pretty complete for my personal use cases.

If you believe there is a feature missing or a tweak necessary, feel free to open a pull request or an issue.

Usage

Installation

cargo install wargo --locked

Wargo.toml (optional)

Add a basic Wargo.toml to your project if you want to configure the behaviour. Most configuration lives in this file, and wargo run also supports run_cwd (config) or --run-cwd <DIR> (CLI) to set the working directory for the executed binary. CLI overrides config; both accept absolute paths, while relative run_cwd is resolved from the workspace root and relative --run-cwd from the current directory.

# Wargo.toml

# this is also the default
dest_base_dir = "~/tmp"

# optional: run the binary from this directory (relative to the workspace root)
# run_cwd = "."

The file could be completely empty, but at least dest_base_dir is good to specify. Use either a location in your home dir (~) or any other absolute path, which is not an NTFS file system.

See a complete and commented example here.

Run it

# instead of `cargo` just replace it with `wargo`:
wargo check
wargo build
wargo build --release
wargo run

# alternatively also callable as a cargo subcommand `wsl`:
cargo wsl build

Safety

This crate uses #![forbid(unsafe_code)] to ensure everything is implemented in 100% Safe Rust.

License

^{Licensed under either of Apache License, Version 2.0 or MIT license at your option.}
_{Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in this crate by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.}