Consider vendoring gethostname's implementation

[james7132]

The crates in this repo already directly use libc and do not really need the crossplatform guarantees that the gethostname crate provides. It might be a good idea to have a vendored safe implementation wrapping libc:gethostname instead.

[notgull]

This would require enabling unsafe code (outside of the XCB module, at least). I would be against this for that reason.

[psychon]

libc::gethostname (obviously) has the ugly C API. gethostname instead uses rustix 's wrapper around uname.

The crates in this repo already directly use libc

Well, kinda. Only the libxcb bindings use libc and only because they need libc::free and some type definitions. Besides that, nothing here uses libc.

In fact, according to cargo tree -p x11rb -e no-dev -i libc, libc does not even appear in the dependency tree by default. So... you are basically asking for a new dependency on libc to get rid of the gethostname dependency.

Might I ask: Why are you asking for the removal of the gethostname dependency? What's the underlying problem you are having?

[james7132]

Might I ask: Why are you asking for the removal of the gethostname dependency? What's the underlying problem you are having?

I was just looking to improve build times and reduce the number of dependencies taken on by Bevy and saw it in the dependency tree. Probably should've checked the x11rb tree first, whoops.

However, looking again, gethostname on *nix builds is just a wrapper around rustix::system::Uname: https://docs.rs/gethostname/latest/src/gethostname/lib.rs.html#53. Do these crates need the Windows implementation?

[psychon]

Do these crates need the Windows implementation?

At least currently it builds and works on Windows. It is even tested in CI. No idea if anyone actually uses that.

I was just looking to improve build times

Random guess: cargo build --timings will point fingers at x11rb-protocol and x11rb. Those crates are just huge. I just tried building bevy from source and... alsa-sys did not build for me. At least I see in the dependency tree that x11rb is brought in only by winit.

winit seems to enable allow-unsafe-code, cursor, dl-libxcb, randr, resource_manager, sync, xinput, xkb. I tried to replicate that locally with a new, empty binary: cargo init --bin ; cargo add x11rb --no-default-features --features allow-unsafe-code,cursor,dl-libxcb,randr,resource_manager,sync,xinput,xkb. Running cargo build --timings for that took 14.7 seconds, 14.13 s of which was spent on x11rb-protocol for all the protocol definitions that are being built. gethostname just took 0.07 s and was finished long before x11rb-protocol was finished. So.... I would fear that removing the gethostname dependency wouldn't help build times.

Somehow getting the 26k + 7k + 3k + 20k + 15k = 71k lines of code that are just the protocol definitions with these features would help. I just do not know how to do that without splitting the crate into a bazilion different features, which I do not want to do.

[notgull]

ref #883