M-m-hilgendorf·Jun 16, 2020
You can, it's how com-rs [0] works and we're co-opting it in vst3-sys [1] for non-Windows targets. It's painful, unsurprisingly. There are some people working on better abstractions, but I hand-coded a VST3 plugin using those macros just for the FFI-safe COM bindings and it is verbose and particularly unsafe [2]
I'm in disagreement with the parent, dynamic dispatch through vtables is only a zero-cost abstraction across FFI boundaries. Personally I'd ballpark about 33% of the value-add of traits are shared interfaces on different types.
The real money is in associated types and trait bounds. The latter is still a serious type-checking requirement at compile time, and the former requires RTTI to support dynamically in some form - both of which have costs at compile and runtime.
All that said, there may be an argument that the features GP is
Read the rest
talking about are covered currently by enum variants (many of the use cases one would have for base classes with associated member variables are done that way, for example), and if you could show how performance and ergonomics improved by increasing the semantic complexity of dyn trait objects - you'd have a strong argument to add it to the language. Just my two cents.
[0] https://github.com/microsoft/com-rs/
[1] https://github.com/RustAudio/vst3-sys
[2] https://github.com/RustAudio/vst3-sys/blob/master/examples/p...