Mastering Rust - Second Edition

Using external C/C++ libraries from Rust

Given the amount of software written over the last three decades, a lot of system software is written in C/C++. It's more likely that you may want to link to an existing library written in C/C++ for use in Rust, as rewriting everything in Rust (though desirable) is not practical for complex projects. But at the same time, writing manual FFI bindings for these libraries is also painful and error-prone. Fortunately, there are tools for us to automatically generate bindings to C/C++ libraries. For this demo, the required code on the Rust side is much simpler than the previous example of calling C/C++ code from Rust, as, this time, we'll use a neat crate called bindgen that automatically generates FFI ...