High-Performance, Zero-Copy Rust bindings for

Rust bindings for RayforceDB, a high-performance columnar database designed for analytics and data operations. The core is written in pure C with minimal overhead — combining columnar storage with SIMD vectorization for lightning-fast analytics on time-series and big-data workloads.

The bindings call the core's C API directly (no marshalling shim), so reads are zero-copy where it counts: a numeric column is exposed as a &[T] slice rather than copied element by element.

Full Documentation: https://rs.rayforcedb.com/

Features

• Fluent API — chainable, intuitive query builders that read like the operation; real operator overloads for arithmetic, methods for comparisons.
• Zero-Copy & High Performance — build a column in a single memcpy, read it back as a borrow; minimal overhead between Rust and the RayforceDB runtime via the C API.
• Type-Safe — a full value model (atoms, vectors, lists, dicts, tables) with ToValue/FromValue conversions and optional chrono temporals.
• Lightweight — the core is less than a 1 MB footprint.
• Batteries included — CSV & splayed I/O, binary serialization, and a TCP/IPC client.

Quick Start

use rayforce::{col, Runtime, Table, Value};

// One live runtime per process; the scope brackets its whole life.
Runtime::scope(|_rt| {
    let quotes = Table::new(
        &["symbol", "bid", "ask"],
        &[
            Value::sym_vec(&["AAPL", "AAPL", "AAPL", "GOOG", "GOOG", "GOOG"]),
            Value::vec(&[100.0f64, 101.0, 102.0, 200.0, 201.0, 202.0]),
            Value::vec(&[110.0f64, 111.0, 112.0, 210.0, 211.0, 212.0]),
        ],
    )?;

    let result = quotes
        .select()
        .agg("max_bid", col("bid").max())
        .agg("min_bid", col("bid").min())
        .agg("avg_ask", col("ask").avg())
        .agg("count",   col("bid").count())
        .filter(col("bid").ge(110.0).and(col("ask").gt(100.0)))
        .by("symbol")
        .execute()?;

    println!("{result}");
    Ok(())
})?;

┌────────┬─────────┬─────────┬─────────┬───────┐
│ symbol │ max_bid │ min_bid │ avg_ask │ count │
│  SYM   │   F64   │   F64   │   F64   │  I64  │
├────────┼─────────┼─────────┼─────────┼───────┤
│ GOOG   │ 202.0   │ 200.0   │ 211.0   │ 3     │
├────────┴─────────┴─────────┴─────────┴───────┤
│ 1 rows (1 shown) 5 columns (5 shown)         │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Installation

The RayforceDB core and the rayforce-q IPC client are C. Both ship inside the crate, so nothing is fetched at build time — the build script compiles them and statically links librayforce.a.

# Cargo.toml
[dependencies]
rayforce = { git = "https://github.com/RayforceDB/rayforce-rs" }

Requirements: a C toolchain (make, clang) and libclang for bindgen.

The C sources are git submodules addressed over SSH (git@github.com:), and Cargo fetches a git dependency's submodules itself. Without a GitHub SSH key, rewrite the URLs to https and make Cargo fetch through git, which honours the rewrite:

git config --global url."https://github.com/".insteadOf "git@github.com:"

# ~/.cargo/config.toml
[net]
git-fetch-with-cli = true

A crates.io dependency needs none of this — the sources ship inside the crate.

Working on the bindings

The C sources live in git submodules under rayforce-sys/vendor/, addressed over SSH, so a checkout needs them initialized:

git clone --recurse-submodules git@github.com:RayforceDB/rayforce-rs.git
# in an existing clone:
git submodule sync --recursive     # picks up a URL change in .gitmodules
git submodule update --init --recursive

cargo build
cargo test

Without a GitHub SSH key, rewrite the submodule URLs to https once with git config --global url."https://github.com/".insteadOf "git@github.com:".

Choosing the core version

Each release links one pinned core version. It lives in two places that must agree — the rayforce-sys/vendor/rayforce submodule, and the CORE_VERSION / CORE_COMMIT constants in rayforce-sys/build.rs that get stamped into librayforce.a (a crate unpacked from crates.io has no git history for the core's Makefile to read a version from).

To move the pin, move both:

git -C rayforce-sys/vendor/rayforce fetch --tags
git -C rayforce-sys/vendor/rayforce checkout v2.6.0
git add rayforce-sys/vendor/rayforce

git -C rayforce-sys/vendor/rayforce rev-parse --short=7 HEAD   # CORE_COMMIT
$EDITOR rayforce-sys/build.rs                                  # CORE_VERSION, CORE_COMMIT

./scripts/check-vendored-pin.sh    # names the mismatch if they disagree
cargo test --workspace

rayforce-sys/vendor/rayforce-q works the same way, minus the constants — nothing is stamped from it.

To build against a core you are changing instead, point the build script at your own checkout. These take precedence over the vendored copies:

export RAYFORCE_SRC=/path/to/rayforce
export RAYFORCE_Q_SRC=/path/to/rayforce-q

Such a checkout is built in place, so incremental state is preserved — except across a core-flavour switch. Release and debug objects share every filename, so the first build after RAYFORCE_CORE_DEBUG changes drops every object under src/ and the librayforce.a beside them, and records the flags in an untracked .stamp. Nothing tracked by git is touched.

bindgen locates libclang via LIBCLANG_PATH. This is deliberately not set in the repo's .cargo/config.toml. If bindgen can't auto-detect libclang, set it yourself:

# macOS (CTL):
export LIBCLANG_PATH="/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/lib"
# Linux:
export LIBCLANG_PATH="$(dirname "$(find /usr/lib -name 'libclang*.so*' | head -1)")"

The chrono is on by default for date/time/timestamp conversions.

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Built with ❤️ for high-performance data processing | MIT Licensed | RayforceDB