rubbl

Rust + Hubble = rubbl = astrophysics in Rust.

This is an exploratory set of basic libraries aimed at allowing astrophysical software, especially astronomy data processing software, to be written in the Rust language.

The current star of of the show is the rubbl_casacore crate, which provides access to the “table” file format used by the CASA radio astronomy data processing suite. The C++ implementation of the table format is wrapped with an ergonomic-as-possible Rust interface.

Installation

The way that Rust packaging works, you probably don’t need to install these crates on their own. Instead, you should create your own crate that specifies these core crates as dependencies. See rubbl-rxpackage for an example of this workflow.

However, this repository does contain a few runnable example tools. Compiling the code requires toolchains for the C++ and Rust languages. Installing the Rust toolchain is generally straightforward; see the Rust installation page for instructions. If the toolchains are properly installed, you can compile and run an example program that summarizes the contents of a CASA table data set by checking out this repository and running:

cargo run --example tableinfo -- path/to/my/table.ms

Finally, this repository does contain a core command-line program called rubbl that simply dispatches invocations to other commands in the same fashion as git and cargo: rubbl foo --bar is farmed out by running the command rubbl-foo --bar. This tool can be installed without even needing to check out this repository — run the command:

cargo install rubbl

Legalities

The bulk of the code is licensed under the MIT License. The casatables_impl crate contains code copied from casacore, which is licensed under the GNU Library General Public License version 2, or any subsequent version at your discretion.