Ruvolution

Analyze the modernity of Rust code bases using various techniques.

Setup

You will need to have the Rust toolchain and the cargo-expand utility installed in your local environment.

Before using this tool, you need to expand the code of the std, core and alloc crates:

1. Clone the official Rust language repository.
2. Use cd to change your working directory to the cloned repository.
3. From the directory, execute the expand-std.sh file from this repository. (e.g. $ ../ruvolution/expand-std.sh)
4. Copy the three generated files (expanded-{std,core,alloc}.rs) back to the Ruvolution directory.

Usage

To see the usage of this tool, use the --help argument:

$ cargo run --release -- --help

It is recommended to run in release mode to enable all optimizations, as source code analysis is quite expensive.

When successfully analyzing a crate, the resulting CSV file should appear in the results folder.

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For example, to analyze twenty spread out versions of the tokio crate, the following command is used:

$ cargo run --release -- tokio

The resulting metrics are then written to results/tokio.csv to be further processed.

Analysis

The Python notebook analyze_results.ipynb is used to plot the resulting metrics to explore the viability of these metrics to measure code modernity.

It does this by reading all CSV files from the results folder, and plotting them against time.