cca1122ddc
Originally, the `interactive` crate was going to be a placeholder for building out a UX that was comparable to that of the existing TypeScript CLI. Though after researching how Ratatui works, that seems difficult to do because it is designed around the idea that it will redraw the full screen buffer each time (and so any scrolling should be "internal" to your Ratatui app) whereas the TypeScript CLI expects to render the full history of the conversation every time(*) (which is why you can use your terminal scrollbar to scroll it). While it is possible to use Ratatui in a way that acts more like what the TypeScript CLI is doing, it is awkward and seemingly results in tedious code, so I think we should abandon that approach. As such, this PR deletes the `interactive/` folder and the code that depended on it. Further, since we added support for mousewheel scrolling in the TUI in https://github.com/openai/codex/pull/641, it certainly feels much better and the need for scroll support via the terminal scrollbar is greatly diminished. This is now a more appropriate default UX for the "multitool" CLI. (*) Incidentally, I haven't verified this, but I think this results in O(N^2) work in rendering, which seems potentially problematic for long conversations.
1.9 KiB
codex-rs
April 24, 2025
Today, Codex CLI is written in TypeScript and requires Node.js 22+ to run it. For a number of users, this runtime requirement inhibits adoption: they would be better served by a standalone executable. As maintainers, we want Codex to run efficiently in a wide range of environments with minimal overhead. We also want to take advantage of operating system-specific APIs to provide better sandboxing, where possible.
To that end, we are moving forward with a Rust implementation of Codex CLI contained in this folder, which has the following benefits:
- The CLI compiles to small, standalone, platform-specific binaries.
- Can make direct, native calls to seccomp and landlock in order to support sandboxing on Linux.
- No runtime garbage collection, resulting in lower memory consumption and better, more predictable performance.
Currently, the Rust implementation is materially behind the TypeScript implementation in functionality, so continue to use the TypeScript implmentation for the time being. We will publish native executables via GitHub Releases as soon as we feel the Rust version is usable.
Code Organization
This folder is the root of a Cargo workspace. It contains quite a bit of experimental code, but here are the key crates:
core/contains the business logic for Codex. Ultimately, we hope this to be a library crate that is generally useful for building other Rust/native applications that use Codex.exec/"headless" CLI for use in automation.tui/CLI that launches a fullscreen TUI built with Ratatui.repl/CLI that launches a lightweight REPL similar to the Python or Node.js REPL.cli/CLI multitool that provides the aforementioned CLIs via subcommands.