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Generating ergonomic C++ APIs using Rustdoc, procedural macros, and Serde

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RustLab Conference
RustLab 23:42 172 views

How to integrate your new shiny Rust code into an existing codebase is a common problem. For this you might need to provide an API so that your Rust code can be accessed from the non-Rust side, for example from a C++ codebase. Rust only provides tools out of the box to define a low level C API, and even that can be troublesome. In this talk we want to demonstrate how you can use procedural macros, Rustdoc's unstable JSON format, and Serde to generate an idiomatic and ergonomic C++ API based on y

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Other talks by Björn Wieczoreck

Generating ergonomic C++ APIs using Rustdoc, procedural macros, and Serde

EuroRust
27:54 1225 views

This talk introduces a novel approach to generate C++ APIs from an existing Rust API by using procedural macros, Rustdoc, and Serde. Functions and impl blocks which should be exposed in the C++ API are annotated with a procedural macro attribute. This macro generates low level extern “C” functions for the corresponding function definitions. Arguments and return values of these functions are passed as byte buffers in this case. Ultimately, Rustdoc’s unstable JSON format is used to generate a set of low level bindings for the generated extern “C” functions and, on top of that, a set of ergonomic high level C++ bindings. An intermediate layer handles all the required (de-)serializing of the argument/return type byte buffers to acquire the corresponding native representations.