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.

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fork-bomber 7 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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elektronika 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> This. It is somewhat disheartening to hear the whole interop-with-C with Rust being an insurmountable problem.

I have done it and it left a bad taste in my mouth. Once you're doing interop with C you're just writing C with Rust syntax topped off with a big "unsafe" dunce cap to shame you for being a naughty, lazy programmer. It's unergonomic and you lose the differentiating features of Rust. Writing safe bindings is painful, and using community written ones tends to pull in dozens of dependencies. If you're interfacing a C library and want some extra features there are many languages that care far more about the developer experience than Rust.

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coldpie 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> a big "unsafe" dunce cap to shame you for being a naughty, lazy programmer

That's bizarrely emotional. It's a language feature that allows you to do things the compiler would normally forbid you from doing. It's there because it's sometimes necessary or expedient to do those things.

	▲	elektronika 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		My point is that using C FFI is "the things the compiler would normally forbid you from doing" so if that's a major portion of your program then you're better off picking a different language. I don't dislike rust, but it's not the right tool for any project that relies heavily on C libraries.

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duped 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> a big "unsafe" dunce cap to shame you for being a naughty, lazy programmer

You just have to get over that. `unsafe` means "compiler cannot prove this to be safe." FFI is unsafe because the compiler can't see past it.

> Once you're doing interop with C you're just writing C with Rust syntax

Just like C++, or go, or anything else. You can choose to wrap it, but that's just indirection for no value imo. I honestly hate seeing C APIs wrapped with "high level" bindings in C++ for the same reason I hate seeing them in Rust. The docs/errors/usage are all in terms of the C API and in my code I want to see something that matches the docs, so it should be "C in syntax of $language".