10 ms·

How we use Rust in our mobile SDK

204 points by nfriedly 7y ago

mbalex99 7y ago
Thank you for the Ditto shoutout! Our team took quite some time to make bitcode and rust work with our customers. Glad to see it was useful for another company building cross platform SDKs.
- mmastrac 7y ago
  Big thank you for making those public. It saved us a bunch of time. We'd like to figure out how to make this easier for people - possibly by providing a binary cross-platform toolchain that "just works".
  - vertak 7y ago
    You should give rust-embedded's `cross` project a look. https://github.com/rust-embedded/cross/ https://github.com/rust-embedded/cross/ I can't find any iOS related directories in their list of targets but there are a couple issues related to supporting apple platforms.
    - tedmielczarek 7y ago
      I don't think this really solves any problems for us unfortunately. The core of the bitcode problem is that you need the rustc you're using to have the exact same version of LLVM as the Xcode toolchain you're using, since bitcode is a not-entirely-stable internal LLVM format. Cross-compiling to most mobile platforms is actually pretty straightforward with Rust.
- tedmielczarek 7y ago
  Thank you for making that available! I understand why it's hard for upstream Rust to provide and I hope they'll find a solution eventually but until then not having to reinvent that wheel saved us a lot of time!
sergiotapia 7y ago
>Overall we feel like the core value propositions that Rust promises (Performance, Reliability, Productivity) have proven true at FullStory. We’re able to write performant code without spending excessive time in optimization. Sounds like they could have had the same things with a much easier language like Nim. Unless they are using a lot of Rust exclusive features? >We can confidently make sweeping changes to our codebase, and trust that the Rust compiler will point out anything that isn’t correct. How true is this?
- leetrout 7y ago
  As true as it is for the classes of errors compilers check in every other compiled language.
  - steveklabnik 7y ago
    Yes and no; there are areas of differentiation between different statically typed languages. For example, Rust has one of the strongest abilities to prevent concurrency/parallelism errors via its type system, but is also missing some other things, like dependent types or higher kinded types.
- james-mcelwain 7y ago
  Is Nim a viable alternative to Rust? Didn't it just release 1.0? Their production users list[1] doesn't look very impressive. The size of ecosystem matters a lot. [1] https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/wiki/Companies-using-Nim https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/wiki/Companies-using-Nim
  - sergiotapia 7y ago
    chicken and egg problem. Nim is a viable alternative to Rust, Python programmers feel right at home, compiles to C, and you can use any C library out there. Nim's performance is also ridiculously fast and low memory.
    - aaron-lebo 7y ago
PudgePacket 7y ago
uMatrix blocks my browser from visiting this site...
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Perhaps because they appear to be an analytics company.
  - Nextgrid 7y ago
    *spyware company
    - vmception 7y ago
      I was working at a startup in 2016 that was using FullStory. We routinely pointed out how the Netflix documentary in 2025 was going to be a conspiracy style one with eerie music. But in the mean time lets flip shares to VC's and larger corporations as fast as possible and move to the Marina like nothing happened
- mkesper 7y ago
  It's also absolutely wasting 50% of mobile screen so completely unusable without reader mode.
- favorited 7y ago
  That explains it. Pi-hole must be eating it for me.
the_mitsuhiko 7y ago
This is really interesting to see. For us (Sentry) we did not dare yet to put rust code onto the client largely because people really want bitcode support and that has been a challenge with an open source SDK because of the custom rust compiler requirements.
- tedmielczarek 7y ago
  (Hi!) I agree the bitcode situation with Rust is painful. Our SDK isn't open source so we're able to sidestep a lot of that pain but we still do have to be mindful of interop issues with the LLVM version we use to build our SDK and the XCode version our customers use to build their apps. It would be nice if Apple and LLVM committed to some bitcode stability guarantees that would make a this easier to handle.
- therockhead 7y ago
  Is bitcode only required for watchOS and tvOS ?
  - tedmielczarek 7y ago
    I believe so, yes, but we have customers that wanted to ship their apps as bitcode (for reasons I'm not aware of) so we need to include bitcode in our framework to support that.
hinkley 7y ago
A bad pattern I’ve been trying to sort out for myself lately is that I pick projects that sound like I would be good at and that could be interesting instead of picking projects that look like ones I actually feel nostalgia for. It’s like I’m always chasing after the Bad Boys or something. Two of the biggest nostalgia experiences have been embedded or mobile projects. I got out when it became clear that the people who run the credit cards make all the money and treat you like a mushroom (keep you in the dark and feed you bullshit). I told a friend at the time that AT&T is a racket for converting VC dollars into free QA. Objectively, how are things in mobile now? Should I have ended my self-imposed exile ages ago? Are they just desktop apps with limited pixels, or is there still skill involved with squeezing things into small spaces?
- hathawsh 7y ago
  I had a simple Radio Shack RC car when I was young. When it started to wear out, I took it apart, hoping I would be able to improve it. It turned out to be nearly pure analog circuitry, and I didn't know where to learn more about analog circuits, so that was the end of that. When I grew up, I got my kids similar cheap RC cars, but when they broke, this time I replaced their circuitry with ESP8266 D1 minis with the D1 motor shield. I 3D printed new shells, added lights, and used PWM frequency variation to play music through the motor windings. I made a simple app that controls the cars over wi-fi. My kids loved them much more than the original. It didn't take much effort because the tools are all much easier to use today, but I'm rather proud of my little accomplishment. I turned a mildly sad childhood event into something really fun for my kids. I turned the nostalgia up to 11. ;-) So if you're looking for some way to do something nostalgic and fun, find a way to make something you've always wanted to make, then give it away. The project isn't really complete until someone else enjoys it.
- amrox 7y ago
  I too am nostalgic for the early days of mobile when system resources and screen size were both scarce. It required creative solutions. It was fun. Nowadays with larger screens and phones that are as fast as your laptop, mobile apps share more in common with desktop apps than not.
- tedmielczarek 7y ago
groobongithub 7y ago
Knowing what the Fullstory product is I'm a bit un-interested in what they're doing with cool new technologies. This is a bit like reading how palantir is using Kubernetes.
- azangru 7y ago
  I wouldn't mind reading about how Palantir uses Kubernetes :-)
rvz 7y ago
Great. Now you have 3 separate languages to maintain. Make that 4 if you're using Flutter or React Native. You could use Kotlin Native [0] to eliminate the tertiary language (Rust) which essentially boils to 2 languages used if your Android app is written in Kotlin and you can then use your business logic as a dynamic library for iOS to link against as a cross-platform SDK. [0] https://kotlinlang.org/docs/tutorials/native/apple-framework.html https://kotlinlang.org/docs/tutorials/native/apple-framework...
mundu_wa_hinya 7y ago
Sad that you geoblock your blog
- nfriedly 7y ago
  Try this link: http://archive.is/B90AA http://archive.is/B90AA
aazaa 7y ago
From the previous article in the series: > Our problem is further complicated by the fact that we’re not shipping an app but a framework for others to use in their own apps. We have to be mindful of the impact our technology choices have on our customers, such as the potential for harmful interactions with their code, and user-visible performance impact in terms of CPU and memory usage. https://bionic.fullstory.com/rust-at-fullstory-part-1/ https://bionic.fullstory.com/rust-at-fullstory-part-1/ Without knowing the details, framework-as-a-product argues strongly for a native-only approach to me. Xcode + ObjC/Swift on iOS and Java on Android. The article(s) might make a better case for polyglot by talking in detail about what the framework does in more detail. The bar for going in that direction would be very high for me.
- tedmielczarek 7y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! You're right that describing our usage a bit better might have helped clarify our thinking. For the record: the FullStory product is a session record and replay tool for both web and mobile. We record details about how your users interact with your site or app and you can watch replays of them as well as get analytics across sessions. Privacy is important to us, which you can read about here: https://bionic.fullstory.com/private-by-default-mobile-analytics/ https://bionic.fullstory.com/private-by-default-mobile-analy... The bulk of what we're doing in Rust is data serialization, along with business logic, part of which is a state machine and part of which is applying specific rules to app content. We did have fully native implementations of this in our prototype. Supporting two parallel implementations would be way harder for us than supporting our Rust implementation. It's hard enough to support the code that's platform-specific by necessity!
tmzt 7y ago
From the article: > Because our code winds up running in other people’s apps we don’t use a full-fledged async runtime like tokio or async-rs since those are optimized for “use all available resources” scenarios like network servers or client applications. Have you considered the recent alternative, smol [1]? Do you have any plans to share source or build scripts for the glue components? How have you been able to incorporate native functionality such as media codecs and screen capture with shared logic written in Rust? Has Rust worked well when you also need to integrate with runtimes such as React Native or Flutter? [1] https://github.com/stjepang/smol https://github.com/stjepang/smol
- steveklabnik 7y ago
  smol was made public yesterday, so I would be very surprised if they considered it.
- stux 7y ago
  Dart’s FFI is still stabilizing, but there’s a small example here https://github.com/brickpop/flutter-rust-ffi https://github.com/brickpop/flutter-rust-ffi
- tedmielczarek 7y ago
  > Have you considered the recent alternative, smol [1]? I've been reading Stjepan's articles and am very interested in what he's doing but we haven't seriously looked into alternatives yet. He reached out to me after this post went live and I've promised to follow up! > Do you have any plans to share source or build scripts for the glue components? We'd like to open source bits of our work that are separable and useful to others but often glue code and build scripts fall way short of that because they're very much tied into our specific arrangement. I'm not sure there's much there that's novel in any event, it's mostly just using the set of crates I list in the post in the standard ways. > How have you been able to incorporate native functionality such as media codecs and screen capture with shared logic written in Rust? We don't handle video currently AIUI so we haven't had to deal with codecs. We primarily try to put platform-specific integration code in the platform-native part of the codebase, which is ObjC for iOS and Java for Android, and transform things down to a more straightforward form like byte buffers to hand off to Rust. > Has Rust worked well when you also need to integrate with runtimes such as React Native or Flutter? We have some React Native support and it hasn't been any worse than supporting the other toolkits we support. I don't think we have Flutter support in a place where I could speak usefully about it.
dpezely 7y ago
For others considering Rust + Kotlin for native Android development, there's also the Visly blog post[1] with basic steps. However, since then, Google officially released `androidx`. Unfortunately, Android Studio or the SDK lack `cargo fix` features of modifying your source code and instead just magically compiles with a compatibility layer. There's a PR on Visly's GitHub repo with these code fixes. Also, their code base is minimal: does just enough with Rust shared library to have an app generate a log message. That's enough if you already know Android development. For a complete end-to-end example search query screen with results screen (Activity, Fragment) using Rust, Kotlin, androidx, RecyclerView, ViewModel, etc., there's [2], but it was written while learning all things Android. Perhaps it might help someone out there! [1] https://medium.com/visly/rust-on-android-19f34a2fb43 https://medium.com/visly/rust-on-android-19f34a2fb43 [2] https://gitlab.com/dpezely/native-android-kotlin-rust https://gitlab.com/dpezely/native-android-kotlin-rust Edit: Yes, that second one is mine. Had fun learning but hopefully will never have to touch mobile dev again beyond maybe a PWA. (I'm a server-side dev.)
- tedmielczarek 7y ago
  I think the build system side is still a bit rough around the edges. It's not hard to get something working, as your examples show, but I haven't seen a solution that feels really well-integrated yet. I'm hoping that tools like bazel/buck/pants continue to get more useful and can provide that kind of experience.
asymptotic 7y ago
I successfully used Rust to create a shared library in a Flutter project that works on both iOS and Android. So far I've only published the iOS app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ezmempass/id1490538369 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ezmempass/id1490538369 I heavily relied on the following blog post: https://dev.to/robertohuertasm/rust-once-and-share-it-with-android-ios-and-flutter-286o https://dev.to/robertohuertasm/rust-once-and-share-it-with-a... Overall it's painful to set up and requires knowledge of the native platform (XCode/Swift, Android Studio/NDK/Kotlin), but overall it works and it was fun getting it working. I'm happy to answer more questions about it, I've been meaning to write up the experience and details.
- boustrophedon 7y ago
  I think it should become easier to do this once the Dart ffi module becomes stable. https://dart.dev/guides/libraries/c-interop https://dart.dev/guides/libraries/c-interop
- nmfisher 7y ago
  I recently did something similar (though I haven't had a chance to clean up or document the repositories for Flutter plugin/Rust library yet). The Flutter application uses FFI to invoke the Rust library, passing a series of strokes (i.e. coordinates on a 2D canvas) and returning a list of Chinese character candidates. Although it's not yet stable, I was very impressed with Dart FFI. I've used both JNI and .NET PInvoke for native interop before, and Dart FFI was probably the easiest (PInvoke is fine, but JNI is horrible). https://github.com/nmfisher/flutter_chinese_character_recognition https://github.com/nmfisher/flutter_chinese_character_recogn... https://github.com/nmfisher/hanzi_lookup https://github.com/nmfisher/hanzi_lookup (forked from the original https://github.com/gugray/hanzi_lookup https://github.com/gugray/hanzi_lookup)
ryuukk_ 7y ago
typical mozilla employee, doesn't know what problem people are trying to solve, and come with bloated solution to bloat stuff even more you should have stick to your mozilla's new JS aka rusty the clown
fulafel 7y ago
For anyone else wondering about the fixation on LLVM bitcode: It seems that Apple in some cases requires app app store uploads in a certain LLVM version's bitcode format (their Xcode is based on LLVM), instead of binaries, so they can do transformations to it before sending out to users. Rust issue about dealing with it: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/35968 https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/35968
- anderspitman 7y ago
  Thanks! I've never developed for iOS and was wondering what that was about.
jamil7 7y ago
I looked briefly into this before starting to port a Swift app to Android. I ended up rewriting all my business logic and I/O in Kotlin Native and found it to be a really great solution. I'm not sure why it isn't more popular to be honest.

204 points by nfriedly 7y ago

Thank you for the Ditto shoutout! Our team took quite some time to make bitcode and rust work with our customers. Glad to see it was useful for another company building cross platform SDKs.

mmastrac 7y ago
Big thank you for making those public. It saved us a bunch of time. We'd like to figure out how to make this easier for people - possibly by providing a binary cross-platform toolchain that "just works".
- vertak 7y ago
  You should give rust-embedded's `cross` project a look. https://github.com/rust-embedded/cross/ https://github.com/rust-embedded/cross/ I can't find any iOS related directories in their list of targets but there are a couple issues related to supporting apple platforms.
  - tedmielczarek 7y ago
    I don't think this really solves any problems for us unfortunately. The core of the bitcode problem is that you need the rustc you're using to have the exact same version of LLVM as the Xcode toolchain you're using, since bitcode is a not-entirely-stable internal LLVM format. Cross-compiling to most mobile platforms is actually pretty straightforward with Rust.
tedmielczarek 7y ago
Thank you for making that available! I understand why it's hard for upstream Rust to provide and I hope they'll find a solution eventually but until then not having to reinvent that wheel saved us a lot of time!

sergiotapia 7y ago

>Overall we feel like the core value propositions that Rust promises (Performance, Reliability, Productivity) have proven true at FullStory. We’re able to write performant code without spending excessive time in optimization. Sounds like they could have had the same things with a much easier language like Nim. Unless they are using a lot of Rust exclusive features? >We can confidently make sweeping changes to our codebase, and trust that the Rust compiler will point out anything that isn’t correct. How true is this?

leetrout 7y ago
As true as it is for the classes of errors compilers check in every other compiled language.
- steveklabnik 7y ago
  Yes and no; there are areas of differentiation between different statically typed languages. For example, Rust has one of the strongest abilities to prevent concurrency/parallelism errors via its type system, but is also missing some other things, like dependent types or higher kinded types.
james-mcelwain 7y ago
Is Nim a viable alternative to Rust? Didn't it just release 1.0? Their production users list[1] doesn't look very impressive. The size of ecosystem matters a lot. [1] https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/wiki/Companies-using-Nim https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/wiki/Companies-using-Nim
- sergiotapia 7y ago
  chicken and egg problem. Nim is a viable alternative to Rust, Python programmers feel right at home, compiles to C, and you can use any C library out there. Nim's performance is also ridiculously fast and low memory.
  - aaron-lebo 7y ago

PudgePacket 7y ago

uMatrix blocks my browser from visiting this site...

saagarjha 7y ago
Perhaps because they appear to be an analytics company.
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  *spyware company
  - vmception 7y ago
    I was working at a startup in 2016 that was using FullStory. We routinely pointed out how the Netflix documentary in 2025 was going to be a conspiracy style one with eerie music. But in the mean time lets flip shares to VC's and larger corporations as fast as possible and move to the Marina like nothing happened
mkesper 7y ago
It's also absolutely wasting 50% of mobile screen so completely unusable without reader mode.
favorited 7y ago
That explains it. Pi-hole must be eating it for me.

the_mitsuhiko 7y ago

This is really interesting to see. For us (Sentry) we did not dare yet to put rust code onto the client largely because people really want bitcode support and that has been a challenge with an open source SDK because of the custom rust compiler requirements.

tedmielczarek 7y ago
(Hi!) I agree the bitcode situation with Rust is painful. Our SDK isn't open source so we're able to sidestep a lot of that pain but we still do have to be mindful of interop issues with the LLVM version we use to build our SDK and the XCode version our customers use to build their apps. It would be nice if Apple and LLVM committed to some bitcode stability guarantees that would make a this easier to handle.
therockhead 7y ago
Is bitcode only required for watchOS and tvOS ?
- tedmielczarek 7y ago
  I believe so, yes, but we have customers that wanted to ship their apps as bitcode (for reasons I'm not aware of) so we need to include bitcode in our framework to support that.

hinkley 7y ago

A bad pattern I’ve been trying to sort out for myself lately is that I pick projects that sound like I would be good at and that could be interesting instead of picking projects that look like ones I actually feel nostalgia for. It’s like I’m always chasing after the Bad Boys or something. Two of the biggest nostalgia experiences have been embedded or mobile projects. I got out when it became clear that the people who run the credit cards make all the money and treat you like a mushroom (keep you in the dark and feed you bullshit). I told a friend at the time that AT&T is a racket for converting VC dollars into free QA. Objectively, how are things in mobile now? Should I have ended my self-imposed exile ages ago? Are they just desktop apps with limited pixels, or is there still skill involved with squeezing things into small spaces?

hathawsh 7y ago
I had a simple Radio Shack RC car when I was young. When it started to wear out, I took it apart, hoping I would be able to improve it. It turned out to be nearly pure analog circuitry, and I didn't know where to learn more about analog circuits, so that was the end of that. When I grew up, I got my kids similar cheap RC cars, but when they broke, this time I replaced their circuitry with ESP8266 D1 minis with the D1 motor shield. I 3D printed new shells, added lights, and used PWM frequency variation to play music through the motor windings. I made a simple app that controls the cars over wi-fi. My kids loved them much more than the original. It didn't take much effort because the tools are all much easier to use today, but I'm rather proud of my little accomplishment. I turned a mildly sad childhood event into something really fun for my kids. I turned the nostalgia up to 11. ;-) So if you're looking for some way to do something nostalgic and fun, find a way to make something you've always wanted to make, then give it away. The project isn't really complete until someone else enjoys it.
amrox 7y ago
I too am nostalgic for the early days of mobile when system resources and screen size were both scarce. It required creative solutions. It was fun. Nowadays with larger screens and phones that are as fast as your laptop, mobile apps share more in common with desktop apps than not.
tedmielczarek 7y ago

groobongithub 7y ago

Knowing what the Fullstory product is I'm a bit un-interested in what they're doing with cool new technologies. This is a bit like reading how palantir is using Kubernetes.

azangru 7y ago
I wouldn't mind reading about how Palantir uses Kubernetes :-)

rvz 7y ago

Great. Now you have 3 separate languages to maintain. Make that 4 if you're using Flutter or React Native. You could use Kotlin Native [0] to eliminate the tertiary language (Rust) which essentially boils to 2 languages used if your Android app is written in Kotlin and you can then use your business logic as a dynamic library for iOS to link against as a cross-platform SDK. [0] https://kotlinlang.org/docs/tutorials/native/apple-framework.html https://kotlinlang.org/docs/tutorials/native/apple-framework...

mundu_wa_hinya 7y ago

Sad that you geoblock your blog

nfriedly 7y ago
Try this link: http://archive.is/B90AA http://archive.is/B90AA

aazaa 7y ago

From the previous article in the series: > Our problem is further complicated by the fact that we’re not shipping an app but a framework for others to use in their own apps. We have to be mindful of the impact our technology choices have on our customers, such as the potential for harmful interactions with their code, and user-visible performance impact in terms of CPU and memory usage. https://bionic.fullstory.com/rust-at-fullstory-part-1/ https://bionic.fullstory.com/rust-at-fullstory-part-1/ Without knowing the details, framework-as-a-product argues strongly for a native-only approach to me. Xcode + ObjC/Swift on iOS and Java on Android. The article(s) might make a better case for polyglot by talking in detail about what the framework does in more detail. The bar for going in that direction would be very high for me.

tedmielczarek 7y ago
Thanks for the feedback! You're right that describing our usage a bit better might have helped clarify our thinking. For the record: the FullStory product is a session record and replay tool for both web and mobile. We record details about how your users interact with your site or app and you can watch replays of them as well as get analytics across sessions. Privacy is important to us, which you can read about here: https://bionic.fullstory.com/private-by-default-mobile-analytics/ https://bionic.fullstory.com/private-by-default-mobile-analy... The bulk of what we're doing in Rust is data serialization, along with business logic, part of which is a state machine and part of which is applying specific rules to app content. We did have fully native implementations of this in our prototype. Supporting two parallel implementations would be way harder for us than supporting our Rust implementation. It's hard enough to support the code that's platform-specific by necessity!

tmzt 7y ago

From the article: > Because our code winds up running in other people’s apps we don’t use a full-fledged async runtime like tokio or async-rs since those are optimized for “use all available resources” scenarios like network servers or client applications. Have you considered the recent alternative, smol [1]? Do you have any plans to share source or build scripts for the glue components? How have you been able to incorporate native functionality such as media codecs and screen capture with shared logic written in Rust? Has Rust worked well when you also need to integrate with runtimes such as React Native or Flutter? [1] https://github.com/stjepang/smol https://github.com/stjepang/smol

steveklabnik 7y ago
smol was made public yesterday, so I would be very surprised if they considered it.
stux 7y ago
Dart’s FFI is still stabilizing, but there’s a small example here https://github.com/brickpop/flutter-rust-ffi https://github.com/brickpop/flutter-rust-ffi
tedmielczarek 7y ago
> Have you considered the recent alternative, smol [1]? I've been reading Stjepan's articles and am very interested in what he's doing but we haven't seriously looked into alternatives yet. He reached out to me after this post went live and I've promised to follow up! > Do you have any plans to share source or build scripts for the glue components? We'd like to open source bits of our work that are separable and useful to others but often glue code and build scripts fall way short of that because they're very much tied into our specific arrangement. I'm not sure there's much there that's novel in any event, it's mostly just using the set of crates I list in the post in the standard ways. > How have you been able to incorporate native functionality such as media codecs and screen capture with shared logic written in Rust? We don't handle video currently AIUI so we haven't had to deal with codecs. We primarily try to put platform-specific integration code in the platform-native part of the codebase, which is ObjC for iOS and Java for Android, and transform things down to a more straightforward form like byte buffers to hand off to Rust. > Has Rust worked well when you also need to integrate with runtimes such as React Native or Flutter? We have some React Native support and it hasn't been any worse than supporting the other toolkits we support. I don't think we have Flutter support in a place where I could speak usefully about it.

dpezely 7y ago

For others considering Rust + Kotlin for native Android development, there's also the Visly blog post[1] with basic steps. However, since then, Google officially released `androidx`. Unfortunately, Android Studio or the SDK lack `cargo fix` features of modifying your source code and instead just magically compiles with a compatibility layer. There's a PR on Visly's GitHub repo with these code fixes. Also, their code base is minimal: does just enough with Rust shared library to have an app generate a log message. That's enough if you already know Android development. For a complete end-to-end example search query screen with results screen (Activity, Fragment) using Rust, Kotlin, androidx, RecyclerView, ViewModel, etc., there's [2], but it was written while learning all things Android. Perhaps it might help someone out there! [1] https://medium.com/visly/rust-on-android-19f34a2fb43 https://medium.com/visly/rust-on-android-19f34a2fb43 [2] https://gitlab.com/dpezely/native-android-kotlin-rust https://gitlab.com/dpezely/native-android-kotlin-rust Edit: Yes, that second one is mine. Had fun learning but hopefully will never have to touch mobile dev again beyond maybe a PWA. (I'm a server-side dev.)

tedmielczarek 7y ago
I think the build system side is still a bit rough around the edges. It's not hard to get something working, as your examples show, but I haven't seen a solution that feels really well-integrated yet. I'm hoping that tools like bazel/buck/pants continue to get more useful and can provide that kind of experience.

asymptotic 7y ago

I successfully used Rust to create a shared library in a Flutter project that works on both iOS and Android. So far I've only published the iOS app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ezmempass/id1490538369 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ezmempass/id1490538369 I heavily relied on the following blog post: https://dev.to/robertohuertasm/rust-once-and-share-it-with-android-ios-and-flutter-286o https://dev.to/robertohuertasm/rust-once-and-share-it-with-a... Overall it's painful to set up and requires knowledge of the native platform (XCode/Swift, Android Studio/NDK/Kotlin), but overall it works and it was fun getting it working. I'm happy to answer more questions about it, I've been meaning to write up the experience and details.

boustrophedon 7y ago
I think it should become easier to do this once the Dart ffi module becomes stable. https://dart.dev/guides/libraries/c-interop https://dart.dev/guides/libraries/c-interop
nmfisher 7y ago
I recently did something similar (though I haven't had a chance to clean up or document the repositories for Flutter plugin/Rust library yet). The Flutter application uses FFI to invoke the Rust library, passing a series of strokes (i.e. coordinates on a 2D canvas) and returning a list of Chinese character candidates. Although it's not yet stable, I was very impressed with Dart FFI. I've used both JNI and .NET PInvoke for native interop before, and Dart FFI was probably the easiest (PInvoke is fine, but JNI is horrible). https://github.com/nmfisher/flutter_chinese_character_recognition https://github.com/nmfisher/flutter_chinese_character_recogn... https://github.com/nmfisher/hanzi_lookup https://github.com/nmfisher/hanzi_lookup (forked from the original https://github.com/gugray/hanzi_lookup https://github.com/gugray/hanzi_lookup)

ryuukk_ 7y ago

typical mozilla employee, doesn't know what problem people are trying to solve, and come with bloated solution to bloat stuff even more you should have stick to your mozilla's new JS aka rusty the clown

fulafel 7y ago

For anyone else wondering about the fixation on LLVM bitcode: It seems that Apple in some cases requires app app store uploads in a certain LLVM version's bitcode format (their Xcode is based on LLVM), instead of binaries, so they can do transformations to it before sending out to users. Rust issue about dealing with it: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/35968 https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/35968

anderspitman 7y ago
Thanks! I've never developed for iOS and was wondering what that was about.

jamil7 7y ago

I looked briefly into this before starting to port a Swift app to Android. I ended up rewriting all my business logic and I/O in Kotlin Native and found it to be a really great solution. I'm not sure why it isn't more popular to be honest.