What a toolchain is

Not one binary: the directory layout, and why the proxies are copies rather than symlinks.

Not one binary. wsharp needs something to link against, so an installation is a directory.

~/.sharpie/
├── bin/{sharpie,wsharp,ingot}     proxies, dispatching on their own name
├── toolchains/<version>-<triple>/ wsharp, ingot, lib/libwsharp_start.a
├── downloads/                     tarballs, kept so a retry need not refetch
├── tmp/                           staging, renamed into place atomically
└── settings.toml

SHARPIE_HOME moves all of it.

A toolchain directory is named <version>-<triple>, with the triple in the name so that a home directory shared over a network cannot collide.

Two existing rules make this work

sharpie needed no change to either program it manages, because of two rules that were already true:

• wsharp looks for its runtime archive beside itself and under ../lib.
• ingot looks for wsharp beside itself before consulting PATH.

A toolchain directory satisfies both, so a proxy can exec straight into one and everything downstream finds what it needs.

Why the proxies are copies

The three files in bin/ are copies of one binary, not symlinks. sharpie reads which program it should be from self_exe, and on Linux that follows a symlink to its target, so a symlinked wsharp would look at itself and see sharpie. Three copies of one binary is the same trade rustup makes.

After os.exec, which is execvp, there is no sharpie left in the process at all. It is not a wrapper that stays in the way.

SHARPIE_HOME is not WSHARP_HOME

These are two variables for two programs, and the split is deliberate:

It is the same split as RUSTUP_HOME and CARGO_HOME. Putting them in one tree would make ingot gc and sharpie uninstall two programs with an opinion about the same directory.

settings.toml

You should not have to edit this, but knowing its shape helps when something is wrong:

version = "1"
default = "0.1.1-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu"
channel = "stable"

[[override]]
path = "/home/you/work/api"
toolchain = "0.1.0-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu"

[[link]]
name = "dev"
dir = "/home/you/WSharp/target/release"

Writes are staged to settings.toml.new and renamed, so an interrupted write cannot leave you with half a file.

downloads/ keeps tarballs so that a retry after a broken connection does not refetch, and tmp/ is where an archive is unpacked before being renamed into toolchains/. An unpack that fails half way leaves nothing behind in toolchains/, which is what lets sharpie tell “not installed” from “damaged”.

Last changed 8 September 2026. Improve this page