Installing Rust nightly builds on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid

Rust is a systems programming language designed around speed and safety. It sits roughly halfway between Go and Haskell. In particular, it combines precise, safe control over memory with high-level functional programming. Haskell programmers, for example, will notice that Rust’s and_then works much like bind in Haskell’s Maybe monad:

use std::os::getenv;
use std::io::net::ip::Port;

/// Look up our server port number in PORT.
fn get_server_port() -> Port {
    getenv("PORT")
        .and_then(|s| from_str::<Port>(s.as_slice()))
        .unwrap_or(8080)
}

Anyway, I spent this morning trying to get Rust working on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid, as part of a larger effort to deploy a Rust application on Heroku. (More on that soon.) On Ubuntu 10.04, rustc fails looking for libstdc++.so.6:

rustc: /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.15' not found

Chris Morgan provided several key hints on IRC. It turns out that the nightly builds work just fine as long as they have access to libstdc++.so.6.0.18. If have root access, you can configure ubuntu-toolchain-r/test and install things normally from there:

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-toolchain-r/test/ubuntu lucid main\ndeb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-toolchain-r/test/ubuntu lucid main\n" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/toolchain.list'
gpg --keyserver wwwkeys.pgp.net --recv-keys 1E9377A2BA9EF27F
gpg --armor --export 1E9377A2BA9EF27F | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libstdc++6
curl -O http://static.rust-lang.org/dist/rust-nightly-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz
tar xzf rust-nightly-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz
cd rust-nightly-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/
sudo ./install.sh

If you don’t have root access, all you need to do is add libstdc++.so.6.0.18 (and a symlink to it from libstdc++.so.6) to LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and run rustc directly from wherever you untarred it:

curl -O http://static.rust-lang.org/dist/rust-nightly-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz
tar xzf rust-nightly-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz
curl -O https://s3.amazonaws.com/rust-builds/rust-support.tar.gz
tar xzvf rust-support.tar.gz
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=~/lib
PATH=~/rust-nightly-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/bin:$PATH

What about Heroku? See my post Deploying Rust applications to Heroku with Rustful for step-by-step instructions.

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