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mozilla
cbindgen
Rust2017–2025
mozilla / cbindgen

cbindgen

A project for generating C bindings from Rust code

Libraries & SDKs
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
15Distinct people
15Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
3KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A project for generating C bindings from Rust code

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year15 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2017-09-07 21:18:48 UTC to 2025-07-02 12:43:03 UTC.

012342017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20172018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202

What Hacker News says

15 sources
coder543·Feb 11, 2025
I suspect there is a communications breakdown happening here. I'll try to clarify what I was saying, since I think I did a poor job. In Rust, when you define a `#[no_mangle] pub unsafe extern "C"` function, and then compile as a shared object / dll, that function will be exposed in an ABI-compatible way the same as any C function would be. It's just a matter of defining the proper header file so that you can use it from a C program, or from any other programming language that can bind to C. Writing a header file manually is boring and error-prone, so people will often autogenerate the header file for the exposed functions using a tool like cbindgen: https://github.com/mozilla/cbindgen We can see that PRQL is using cbindgen here to automatically create a C header: https://github.com/PRQL/prql/tree/main/prqlc/bindings/prqlc-... The public A
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PI that PRQL wants to expose is defined in Rust here: https://github.com/PRQL/prql/blob/main/prqlc/bindings/prqlc-... The generated C header file is here: https://github.com/PRQL/prql/blob/main/prqlc/bindings/prqlc-... And that C header file -- combined with the compiled library -- should be all that is needed. I suspect that the PRQL maintainer is saying that they want to offer a more idiomatic binding for C. The raw API that is exposed may not be the most user-friendly API, especially since they don't seem to have much familiarity with what is considered "idiomatic" in C, so they haven't been ready to commit to that API being considered "stable" yet. Based on my own poking around in their existing bindings... that C binding appears to be the API that they are using internally in those other language bindings already. (I'm also not sure how else they would be creating most of those bindings, if they weren't using that C binding... apart from some special cases, like how there is a convenient alternative for exposing bindings to Python from Rust, for example.) We can see in the dotnet bindings, for example: https://github.com/PRQL/prql/blob/main/prqlc/bindings/dotnet... C# does not allow directly using a C header file, so it requires manually re-defining the same set of extern function signatures, but it appears to be the same. I'm not an expert on PRQL by any means, and it's been a few years since I really used Rust, but I'm just piecing together what I can see here. This article I found could also be helpful: https://www.greyblake.com/blog/exposing-rust-library-to-c/ Rust code normally does not adhere to a C-compatible ABI, but the purpose of these "extern" functions is to do exactly that when you're trying to expose code that can be called by standard conventions... since the industry has largely settled on C-style functions and structs, for better or worse, with all of the limitations that imposes.
In How about trailing commas in SQL?
jitl·Oct 2, 2024
Rust is just another programming language that’s quite similar to C++. The main difference is there’s like 4 types for String (some are references and some are owned) and methods for a struct go in a `impl StructName` block after the struct definition instead of inside it. I don’t really know rust either but I’m currently writing some bindings to expose Rust libraries to NodeJS and not having too much trouble. For rust -> c++ I googled one time and found this tool which Mozilla seems to use to call Rust from C++ in their web browser, maybe it would “just work”: https://github.com/mozilla/cbindgen?tab=readme-ov-file
In SlateDB – An embedded database built on object storage
akubera·Jul 21, 2019
https://github.com/libp2p/rust-libp2p There's the Rust repository, and the auto-generated documentation can be found at https://docs.rs/libp2p/0.11.0/libp2p/ I'm curious what about a C implementation is the requirement for you? Is it the ability for to link against your C/C++ code, or for reading and understanding the structures and algorithms with the simplicity of C parlance, or another reason? If the first one, it is possible to create a C shared-library "cdylib" with Rust (included in cargo by default), and using cbindgen[1] you can generate the headers to use the c-api. It doesn't look like anybody has done that yet, unfortunately. But know that it should be a lot easier to create C/C++ compatibility than doing a rewrite or port. [1] https://github.com/eqrion/cbindgen EDIT: Or as the sibling comment points out, there ARE C implementa
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tions out there, so you can ignore this post.
In Understanding IPFS in Depth(5/6): What Is Libp2p?
maowtm·Jul 5, 2019
Rust works pretty well with C, and you could use cbindgen[0] to generate c headers for rust functions marked as extern and it would work when linked together. However, rustls doesn't seems to be providing any such function. Most of its API is rust-based, using stuff that isn't directly available in C (Option, Vec, etc.). So you would have to write at least some rust code that calls the library, and have your C code calls the rust code that you write. On the flip side, calling C code in rust is pretty easy - you have the entire libc available, and rust-bindgen[1] generate bindings for you, which in my experience works very well. So, you may also consider writing your program in rust… If that's possible. [0]: https://github.com/eqrion/cbindgen [1]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-bindgen
In TLS Performance: Rustls versus OpenSSL
swgillespie·Aug 24, 2018
There are a couple of projects that do this for Rust, depending on what your inputs and outputs are: * https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/rust-bindgen - Inputs are C/C++ headers, outputs are Rust type definitions and extern functions to interoperate with the type and functions in the headers * https://github.com/immunant/c2rust - Inputs are C headers and source, outputs Rust code that is semantically equivalent to the C (modulo bugs, etc.) * https://github.com/eqrion/cbindgen/ - Inputs are Rust source, outputs C/C++ headers that can be used to interoperate with the types and functions exposed by Rust
In The Dark Arts of Advanced and Unsafe Rust Programming
samjs·Mar 9, 2018
I wrote on a similar topic [1], about writing system libraries in Rust with a C API and bindings to other languages. Which covers a bit of this, plus some of the sharp edges of FFI. Most of the trickier parts of it are covered in the FFI omnibus [2]. Also worth checking out is the cbindgen tool [3]. [1]: https://libpasta.github.io/blog/bindings/ [2]: http://jakegoulding.com/rust-ffi-omnibus/ [3]: https://github.com/eqrion/cbindgen
In Relibc: C Library in Rust for Redox and Linux

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