Comment by BearOso
2 hours ago
If Rust has one weakness right now, it's bindings to system and hardware libraries. There's a massive barrier in Rust communicating with the outside ecosystem that's written in C. The definitive choice to use Rust and an existing Wayland abstraction library narrows their options down to either creating bindings of their own, or using smithay, the brand new Rust/Wayland library written for the Cosmic desktop compositor. I won't go into details, but Cosmic is still very much in beta.
It would have been much easier and cost-effective to use wlroots, which has a solid base and has ironed out a lot of problems. On the other hand, Cosmic devs are actively working on it, and I can see it getting better gradually, so you get some indirect manpower for free.
I applaud the choice to not make another core Wayland implementation. We now have Gnome, Plasma, wlroots, weston, and smithay as completely separate entities. Dealing with low-level graphics is an extremely difficult topic, and every implementor encounters the same problems and has to come up with independent solutions. There's so much duplicated effort. I don't think people getting into it realize how deceptively complex and how many edge-cases low-level graphics entails.
There really isn't a "massive barrier" to FFI. Autogenerate the C bindings and you're done. You don't have to wrap it in a safe abstraction, and imo you shouldn't.
This. It is somewhat disheartening to hear the whole interop-with-C with Rust being an insurmountable problem. Keeping the whole “it’s funded by the Government/Google etc” nonsense aside: I personally wish that at least a feeble attempt would be made to actually use the FFI capabilities that Rust and its ecosystem has before folks form an opinion. Personally - and I’m not ashamed to state that I’m an early adopter of the language - it’s very good. Please consider that the Linux kernel project, Google, Microsoft etc went down the Rust path not on a whim but after careful analysis of the pros and cons. The pros won out.