rust-bindgen

Right now the only language-level thing I would like is const operator overloading. Even supporting MSRV as old as 1.63 was not a big deal, the worst thing was dependencies using let...else which we will vendor and patch. Pin is what it is, but it is mostly okay since I haven't needed projection so far. Initialization using Linux's "impl PinInit<Self>" approach seems to be working very well in my early experiments, I contributed changes to use the crate without unstable features. In the FFI area: Bindgen support for toml configuration (https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-bindgen/pull/2917 but it could also be response files on the command line), and easier passing of closures from Rust to C (though I found a very nice way to do it for ZSTs that implement Fn, which is by far the common case). The "data structure interoperability" part of the

Essentially, this has been Rusts value proposition from the outset - build a language that you can integrate into other codebases seamlessly, hence the choice of no runtime, no garbage collector etc. Bindgen (https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-bindgen) and similar tooling were around essentially since day one to assist in that. It’s the only approach that has any chance of transitioning away from unsafe languages for existing, mature codebases. Rewriting entirely in a different language is not a reasonable proposition for every practical real-world project.

Calling C from Rust can be quite simple. You just declare the external function and call it. For example, straight out of the Rust book https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch19-01-unsafe-rust.html#usin... : extern "C" { fn abs(input: i32) -> i32; } fn main() { unsafe { println!("Absolute value of -3 according to C: {}", abs(-3)); } } Now, if you have a complex library and don't want to write all of the declarations by hand, you can use a tool like bindgen to automatically generate those extern declarations from a C header file: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-bindgen There's an argument to be made that something like bindgen could be included in Rust, not requiring a third party dependency and setting up build.rs to invoke it, but that's not really the issue at hand in this article. The issue is not the

This is not a notable challenge in rust, nor relevant to the article. The article is about finding ways of using rust to actually implement kernel fs drivers/etc. Note that any rust code in the kernel is necessarily consuming C interfaces. Bindgen works quite well for the use case that you are thinking. https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-bindgen