Comment by pornel
6 years ago
It would be super cool if Rust supported the Swift ABI. Currently use of Rust for macOS or iOS applications necessarily involves adding a plain C layer between Swifty UI and Rusty back-end.
6 years ago
It would be super cool if Rust supported the Swift ABI. Currently use of Rust for macOS or iOS applications necessarily involves adding a plain C layer between Swifty UI and Rusty back-end.
You can go in the other direction, no? Write a Rust library with a C FFI (directly in Rust) and call it from Swift?
This is what I meant by a "C layer". No matter how you slice it, you have to "dumb down" communication to the C level and generate C headers. Then you either work with opaque types, or have to generate extra translation and/or wrapper types for classes, closures, etc. Both languages treat C as "unsafe", so it also makes memory safety trickier than if they could use their native safe APIs.
Ok yeah I understand what you mean. Yeah it would be super interesting to have closer integration between Swift and Rust. For instance, if you could treat Rust traits as protocols or vice versa. It seems super compelling the idea of writing low-level memory handling in Rust and then operating on it with high level Swift code.