I’m super new to Rust, like a day old really.

But I tried a program made in Rust on Windows, and it refuses to work.

Never prints anything. Just straight up instantly dead. Long story short, this thing relies on some linked stuff like ffmpeg in some form. So, I did my best trying to gather all the things it needs per github issues, reddit and other souces. And the end result was that it now spent 0.1 s longer before crashing, actually leaving time for some error in the Windows Event log. Nothing useful there either as far as I can see.

So I clone the repo and get the required things to compile Rust, and I managed to build it from source at least. The executable doesn’t run, but the Run in VS Code works, somehow. It prints the error messages corresponding to missing input. So i try to debug it, but nothing happens. No breakpoint is hit, and nothing is printed in the terminal, unlike when using Run or cargo Run. I can also just strip out everything it does in the file the main function is in, and it will hit breakpoints. But that didn’t help me find out what is missing/broken though.

So what the difference, is there a way to catch and prevent Rust from just going silent, and actually tell you what dependencies it failed to load?

My entire reason for getting it running locally is to fix that. Because no one sane wants to deal with a program that doesn’t tell you why it will not run… And when debugging also does nothing… I’m out of ideas.

The program is called Av1an for reference, and it’s a video encoding tool. I used a python version before they migrated to Rust, and wanted to give it a try again.

Edit: Wrote linked library, but i think the proper term is dynamic libraries. I’m really not good with compiled programs.

Update: Figured it out. Had to copy the out files from the ffmpeg compiled stuff back to the executable. Apparently Cargo Run includes that location when looing for the files, while running from the command line clearly doesn’t.

But the biggest whiplash, was that I got a full windows dialog popup when i tried to in the exectuable in CMD instead of Powershell. Told me the exact file I was missing too. I know PowerShell is a bitch when piping stuff, but I’m amazed no other program or error message could hand me that vital information. Fuck me, I wish I had tried that from the start…