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That's the inverse of my question. If Rust is going to replace things written in C, other stuff is going to want to dynamically link to it. A statically compil

by rlpb 4y ago

That's the inverse of my question. If Rust is going to replace things written in C, other stuff is going to want to dynamically link to it. A statically compiled Rust based replacement for an entire distribution isn't a realistic proposition, unless you fancy downloading a gig or two every time there's a security update and everything has to be rebuilt.

tsimionescu 4y ago
Theoretically, you could dynamically link with other Rust code that exposes the standard C ABI. This used to be common for C++ code, when name mangling was different between different compilers and versions - so a C++ library that wanted to be portable had to expose a C ABI, and C++ apps would dynamically link to it by calling that C ABI. Of course, this meant no exceptions, no destructors, no std:: data structures, but such was the price.
dmitris 4y ago
It is possible to use Rust shared objects in C (and other languages) with the "cdylib" or "staticlib" crate types and when the Rust functions are marked with 'extern "C"'. See https://docs.rust-embedded.org/book/interoperability/rust-with-c.html https://docs.rust-embedded.org/book/interoperability/rust-wi... and https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/linkage.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/linkage.html. The YouTube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zmaLhSAkNE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zmaLhSAkNE has an example/demo and Jon Gjengset has the "Reverse FFI" section in his "Crust of Rust: Build Scripts and Foreign-Function Interfaces (FFI)" video at 2:02:57 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pePqWoTnSmQ&t=7378s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pePqWoTnSmQ&t=7378s. Finally, https://prog.world/building-and-using-dynamic-link-libraries-in-rust/ https://prog.world/building-and-using-dynamic-link-libraries... is yes another article on "Building and using dynamic link libraries in Rust".

by rlpb 4y ago

tsimionescu 4y ago

Theoretically, you could dynamically link with other Rust code that exposes the standard C ABI. This used to be common for C++ code, when name mangling was different between different compilers and versions - so a C++ library that wanted to be portable had to expose a C ABI, and C++ apps would dynamically link to it by calling that C ABI. Of course, this meant no exceptions, no destructors, no std:: data structures, but such was the price.

dmitris 4y ago

It is possible to use Rust shared objects in C (and other languages) with the "cdylib" or "staticlib" crate types and when the Rust functions are marked with 'extern "C"'. See https://docs.rust-embedded.org/book/interoperability/rust-with-c.html https://docs.rust-embedded.org/book/interoperability/rust-wi... and https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/linkage.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/linkage.html. The YouTube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zmaLhSAkNE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zmaLhSAkNE has an example/demo and Jon Gjengset has the "Reverse FFI" section in his "Crust of Rust: Build Scripts and Foreign-Function Interfaces (FFI)" video at 2:02:57 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pePqWoTnSmQ&t=7378s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pePqWoTnSmQ&t=7378s. Finally, https://prog.world/building-and-using-dynamic-link-libraries-in-rust/ https://prog.world/building-and-using-dynamic-link-libraries... is yes another article on "Building and using dynamic link libraries in Rust".