Robustone

Robustone is an experimental disassembly engine written in Rust by the HUST Open Atom Club. Inspired by the Capstone project, it explores how Rust's strong safety guarantees can be used to deliver a Capstone-compatible experience with a cleaner codebase and modern tooling.

Requirements

• Rust 1.75 or newer (edition 2021).
• Python 3.8 or newer for parity tests.
• git and basic build tools for fetching the Capstone reference implementation.

Project layout

robustone/         # Metadata crate including both library and binary
robustone-core/    # Architecture-specific decoding and formatting (Rust port of Capstone)
robustone-cli/     # Command-line parsing, input validation, and presentation logic
test/
	riscv32/       # Python scripts and fixtures for RISC-V parity checks
third_party/
	capstone/      # Optional checkout of the original Capstone project (used by tests)
Cargo.toml     	   # Workspace manifest

Getting started

Clone the repository (including the submodules, if any) and install the toolchain requirements above. The bundled Makefile offers shortcuts for common workflows:

Target	Description
make build	Compile the crate in debug mode.
make check	Run cargo check for fast type verification.
make format	Format the Rust codebase with rustfmt.
make run	Launch the CLI in debug mode (accepts the same arguments as cargo run).
make test	Build Capstone (if missing), run parity tests, and execute the Rust unit tests.

The test target downloads Capstone into third_party/capstone on first use, builds the comparison tool, runs test/riscv32/test_vs_cstool.py, and finally executes cargo test.

Running the CLI

The CLI mirrors the classic cstool UX. For example, to decode a RISC-V instruction with detailed output:

make run -- riscv32 13000513 -d

The command also accepts arguments without the explicit -- separator:

make run riscv32 13000513 -d

Internally the target forwards any trailing words to the binary (or you can pass them via RUN_ARGS="...").

Testing

Run the full regression suite from the repository root:

make test

This command:

1. Ensures Capstone is available under third_party/capstone (clones the repository if necessary).
2. Builds Capstone's cstool helper using test/build_cstool.sh.
3. Executes the Python parity harness test/riscv32/test_vs_cstool.py and compares Robustone output with Capstone across the curated instruction list.
4. Runs cargo test for Rust unit coverage.

If you only need to validate the Python comparison script, run it directly:

python3 test/riscv32/test_vs_cstool.py