ebd2ae4abd
In putting up https://github.com/openai/codex/pull/665, I discovered that the `expanduser` crate does not compile on Windows. Looking into it, we do not seem to need it because we were only using it with a value that was passed in via a command-line flag, so the shell expands `~` for us before we see it, anyway. (I changed the type in `Cli` from `String` to `PathBuf`, to boot.) If we do need this sort of functionality in the future, https://docs.rs/shellexpand/latest/shellexpand/fn.tilde.html seems promising.
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.interactive/CLI with a UX comparable to the TypeScript Codex CLI.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.