Compilation

The Unit is the primary data structure representing a single execution of the compiler. It (mostly) contains all the information needed to determine which flags to pass to the compiler.

The entry to the compilation process is located in the cargo_compile module. The compilation can be conceptually broken into these steps:

1. Perform dependency resolution (see the resolution chapter).
2. Generate the root Units, the things the user requested to compile on the command-line. This is done in generate_targets.
3. Starting from the root Units, generate the UnitGraph by walking the dependency graph from the resolver. The UnitGraph contains all of the Unit structs, and information about the dependency relationships between units. This is done in the unit_dependencies module.
4. Construct the BuildContext with all of the information collected so far. This is the end of the "front end" of compilation.
5. Create a Context, a large, mutable data structure that coordinates the compilation process.
6. The Context will create a JobQueue, a data structure that tracks which units need to be built.
7. drain_the_queue does the compilation process. This is the only point in Cargo that currently uses threads.
8. The result of the compilation is stored in the Compilation struct. This can be used for various things, such as running tests after the compilation has finished.