Starship Compilation Failure On Debian GNU/Hurd 2025
Are you experiencing issues compiling Starship on Debian GNU/Hurd 2025? You're not alone! This article dives into a specific compilation failure encountered with the systemstat crate and explores potential solutions for getting Starship up and running on your Hurd system. Starship is a blazing-fast, cross-shell prompt that can greatly enhance your command-line experience. However, like any software, it can sometimes encounter compatibility issues with less common operating systems like Debian GNU/Hurd. Understanding the root cause of these issues is the first step towards resolving them.
The Issue: systemstat Crate Compilation Failure
One user reported a compilation failure while installing Starship on Debian GNU/Hurd 2025. The error occurs during the compilation of the systemstat crate, a dependency used by Starship to gather system information. The error messages indicate unresolved imports and missing types, specifically:
error[E0432]: unresolved import self::platform::PlatformImplerror[E0412]: cannot find type PlatformMemory in this scopeerror[E0412]: cannot find type PlatformSwap in this scope
These errors suggest that the systemstat crate doesn't have proper support for the Hurd operating system. The crate uses conditional compilation (cfg attributes) to include platform-specific code. It appears that Hurd is not yet recognized as a target platform within the systemstat crate's configuration.
The user's attempt to install Starship using cargo install starship --locked resulted in the download and compilation of 403 crates. The compilation process proceeds smoothly until it reaches the systemstat crate, where the errors halt the installation. This highlights the critical role of the systemstat crate in the overall Starship build process. Without a successful compilation of this dependency, Starship cannot be installed.
Diving Deeper into the Error Messages
The error messages provide valuable clues about the underlying issue. The unresolved import self::platform::PlatformImpl error indicates that the PlatformImpl type, which is expected to be defined within the platform module, cannot be found. This is further clarified by the subsequent notes, which point out that the various implementations of PlatformImpl are conditionally compiled for different operating systems (Windows, FreeBSD, macOS, Linux, etc.). Since Hurd is not among the listed target operating systems, the PlatformImpl type is effectively excluded from the compilation.
Similarly, the cannot find type PlatformMemory in this scope and cannot find type PlatformSwap in this scope errors indicate that the PlatformMemory and PlatformSwap types are also not being included in the build for Hurd. These types are likely defined within platform-specific modules and are subject to the same conditional compilation logic as PlatformImpl. The error messages highlight the absence of a Hurd-specific implementation for these types within the systemstat crate.
Understanding Conditional Compilation
Conditional compilation is a powerful technique used in Rust (and other programming languages) to tailor code for different environments. By using cfg attributes, developers can specify which parts of the code should be included based on factors like the target operating system, architecture, or enabled features. This allows for a single codebase to support multiple platforms without requiring separate builds or manual code modifications. However, it also means that if a particular platform is not explicitly supported, the corresponding code will be excluded from the compilation.
In the case of the systemstat crate, conditional compilation is used extensively to provide platform-specific implementations for system information retrieval. This is necessary because different operating systems expose system statistics through different APIs and data structures. The crate uses cfg attributes to select the appropriate implementation based on the target_os and target_vendor values. The absence of a `target_os =
