Publish pre-built gems to avoid native extension compilation

[dbackeus]

gem install itsi takes 1 minute 43 seconds on my M1 MacBook Pro. This makes it the slowest installing gem I've ever seen and would make me think twice about using it since it would impact all developers dev machines as well as slow down CI/CD pipelines.

It has become pretty fairlry common for gems with native extensions to provide pre-built gems for the common linux / macos environments to avoid wasting time on compilation. Eg. nokogiri, fii, google-protobuf etc.

Perhaps this could even bypass the need to have cargo etc installed on the host machine?

[wouterken]

Hey @dbackeus
Yes, it's a great idea, and just unfortunately something I haven't yet had time to play with (as naturally it makes the gem publishing experience a bit more slow and involved, and in these very early development stages of Itsi, minor versions can still change fairly quickly).

rb-sys appears to support this use-case out of the box, so I'm optimistic this will significantly help install speeds once incorporated.

[retorted]

Hi @wouterken 👋 I'm a Rails dev and a Rustacean and I've just discovered Itsi. Very exciting project! 😍

I had a go at forking Itsi and playing around with cross-compiling it via the oxidise-rb Github actions using this example workflow: https://oxidize-rb.org/docs/cross-platform#cross-compiling-for-release just to try it out and see what happened...

After a couple of failed builds and some tinkering, these are my top-level notes:

• The examples in the oxidise-rb docs are a bit outdated and not very useful
• Shopify have some Rust-Ruby gems with up-to-date workflows for this which might be a better starting point to crib notes from, eg: https://github.com/Shopify/lz4-flex-rb/blob/main/.github/workflows/release.yml
• I think in this case where the itsi gem is kind of a meta-package for the two itsi-server and itsi-scheduler gems I think you'd need to cross-compile each of them separately, which adds a bit more complexity (like a workflow that compiles and publishes the sub-gems to Rubygems before releasing the parent gem)

I'll play around with it a bit more at some point this week and see where I get to...

[retorted]

More notes, following a lot of messing around:

• The cross-gem docker containers generally fail to run bundle install (the first step), because they are missing the required packages to build the native extension for the pg gem. I temporarily skipped this problem by commenting it out in the itsi Gemfile. pg is only a dependency for tests, so in theory it isn't needed for this precompiling step? Opening an issue in oxidise-rb/rb-sys might be a good idea.
• The x86_64-linux container fails to compile aws-lc-sys with the error: Your compiler (x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc) is not supported due to a memcmp related bug reported in https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=95189. We strongly recommend against using this compiler.
• The x86_64-darwin (Mac) container fails to compile aws-lc-sys, with the error: ERROR: /usr/bin/ld: unrecognized option '-dynamic'. Possibly related issue: Linux -> Mac cannot cross compile aws-lc-sys aws/aws-lc-rs#409
• The arm64-darwin (Mac Silicon) container fails to compile ring for some reason
• The x64-mingw-ucrt (Windows) container has problems with the itsi_error crate, as it depends on the nix crate (which doesn't seem to support Windows)

 error[E0433]: failed to resolve: could not find `errno` in `nix`
  --> ext/itsi_error/src/lib.rs:42:27
   |
42 |     NixErrno(#[from] nix::errno::Errno),
   |                           ^^^^^ could not find `errno` in `nix`

I initially thought this might be an easy job, but it appears to be quite a quagmire 🤕

[retorted]

I managed to get it working for x86_64-linux and arm64-darwin builds by ignoring the oxide-rb docker setup and just running the rake native:* tasks in standard GH runners with a few tweaks 🎉

@wouterken shall I drop you a draft PR?

Preview here: retorted@5ea3a58

[wouterken]

Thanks very much for your efforts @retorted , would be great to have this working, apologies that I haven't had much time recently to pay attention to this.

Yes please feel free to drop a PR and I'll take a look at it when I get a chance soon. 🙏