Nix seeks to provide friendly bindings to various *nix platform APIs (Linux, Darwin, ...). The goal is to not provide a 100% unified interface, but to unify what can be while still providing platform specific APIs.
For many system APIs, Nix provides a safe alternative to the unsafe APIs exposed by the libc crate. This is done by wrapping the libc functionality with types/abstractions that enforce legal/safe usage.
As an example of what Nix provides, examine the differences between what is exposed by libc and nix for the gethostname system call:
// libc api (unsafe, requires handling return code/errno)
pub unsafe extern fn gethostname(name: *mut c_char, len: size_t) -> c_int;
// nix api (returns a nix::Result)
pub fn gethostname(name: &mut [u8]) -> Result<()>;nix target support consists of three tiers:
- Tier 1 - Target is supported and CI both builds and tests
- Tier 2 - Target is supported and CI builds the target
- Tier 3 - Target is supported and CI both builds and tests but test failures do not block merging code
The following targets are all supported by nix on Rust 1.13.0 or newer:
Tier 1:
- i686-unknown-linux-gnu
- x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
- i686-apple-darwin
- x86_64-apple-darwin
- aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu
- armv7-unknown-linux-gnueabihf
- arm-unknown-linux-gnueabi
Tier 2:
- i686-unknown-freebsd
- x86_64-unknown-freebsd
- x86_64-unknown-netbsd
Tier 3:
- i686-unknown-linux-musl
- x86_64-unknown-linux-musl
- mips-unknown-linux-gnu
- mipsel-unknown-linux-gnu
- powerpc-unknown-linux-gnu
To use nix, first add this to your Cargo.toml:
[dependencies]
nix = "0.8.0"Then, add this to your crate root:
extern crate nix;Contributions are very welcome. Please See CONTRIBUTING for additional details.
Nix is licensed under the MIT license. See LICENSE for more details.