EvCxR Jupyter Kernel
A Jupyter Kernel for the Rust programming language.
Installation
Linux (Debian/Ubuntu)
Alternative instructions if you want to use libzmq from your system:
Mac OS X
install jupyter or jupyterlab (eg. via anaconda)
Alternative instructions if you want to use libzmq from your system:
Windows
Note that Evcxr on Windows appears to be substantially slower than on other platforms. We're not yet sure why.
- Install jupyter or jupyterlab (eg. via anaconda)
- Install CMake
If you'd like to install ZMQ yourself, rather than having cargo install build it for you, then These instructions might help.
Usage notes
- To see what variables you've got defined, type ":vars".
- Don't ask Jupyter to "interrupt kernel", it won't work. Rust threads can't be interrupted.
- If your code panics, all variables will be lost. You can optionally run
:preserve_vars_on_panic 1
to turn on preservation of variables. However note that this will slow down compilation. Also, only variables that either are not referenced by the code being run, or are Copy will be preserved. - If your code segfaults (e.g. due to buggy unsafe code), aborts, exits etc, the process in which the code runs will be restarted. All variables will be lost.
Custom output
The last expression in a cell gets printed. By default, we'll use the debug
formatter to emit plain text. If you'd like, you can provide a function to show
your type (or someone else's type) as HTML (or an image). To do this, the type
needs to implement a method called evcxr_display
which should then print
one or more mime-typed blocks to stdout. Each block starts with a line
containing BEGIN_EVCXR_OUTPUT followed by the mime type, then a newline, the
content then ends with a line containing EVCXR_END_CONTENT.
For example, the following shows how you might provide a custom display function for a type Matrix. You can copy this code into a Jupyter notebook cell to try it out.
use Debug;
let m = Matrix ;
m
It's probably a good idea to either print the whole block at once, or to lock stdout then print the block. This should ensure that nothing else prints to stdout at the same time (at least no other Rust code).
If the content is binary (e.g. mime type "image/png") then it should be base64 encoded.
Startup options
If you always want particular options set, you can add these to init.evcxr which, if present will be run on startup. Sample locations:
- Linux: ~/.config/evcxr/init.evcxr
- Mac: /Users/Alice/Library/Preferences/evcxr/init.evcxr
- Windows: C:\Users\Alice\AppData\Roaming\evcxr\init.evcxr
For example, if you want to always turn on optimization (will make stuff slower to compile), you might put the following in init.evcxr:
:opt 2
sccache integration
sccache caches compilation outputs. If you frequently use the same crates, this can speed things up quite a bit.
cargo install sccache
- Add
:sccache 1
to your init.evcxr (see Startup options above). - See sccache for more details about sccache.
Uninstall