Rust-for-Linux VS cxx

Compare Rust-for-Linux vs cxx and see what are their differences.

Rust-for-Linux

Adding support for the Rust language to the Linux kernel. (by Rust-for-Linux)

cxx

Safe interop between Rust and C++ (by dtolnay)
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Rust-for-Linux cxx
79 97
3,769 5,386
1.9% -
0.0 9.3
4 days ago 5 days ago
C Rust
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

Rust-for-Linux

Posts with mentions or reviews of Rust-for-Linux. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-18.
  • The Linux Kernel Prepares for Rust 1.77 Upgrade
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Feb 2024
    At least according to the Github's language breakdown for https://github.com/Rust-for-Linux/linux, C is still 98.3% of the repository, and Rust is in the 0.1% of "others".
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Feb 2024
    Rust is backwards compatible when you stick to stable features, but the kernel uses unstable features that can and do incur breaking changes.

    https://github.com/Rust-for-Linux/linux/issues/2

  • Mark Russinovich: “Working towards enabling Windows driver development in Rust”
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Sep 2023
    > How would this work?

    Don't know exactly what you're asking.

    > And why would it be a better idea?

    Poorly written device drivers are a significant attack vector. It's one of the reasons Linux is now exploring using Rust for its own device drivers.[0] You may be asking -- why Rust and not some other language? Rust has many of the performance and interoperability advantages of C and C++, but as noted, makes certain classes of memory safety issues impossible. Rust also has significant mindshare among systems programming communities.

    [0]: https://rust-for-linux.com

  • The Linux Kernel Module Programming Guide
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 May 2023
    Ctrl-F "rust"

    https://rust-for-linux.com/ links to LWN articles at https://lwn.net/Kernel/Index/#Development_tools-Rust that suggest that only basic modules are yet possible with the rust support in Linux kernels 6.2 and 6.3.

    Rust-for-linux links to the Android binder module though:

    > Android Binder Driver: This project is an effort to rewrite Android's Binder kernel driver in Rust.

    > Motivation: Binder is one of the most security and performance critical components of Android. Android isolates apps from each other and the system by assigning each app a unique user ID (UID). This is called "application sandboxing", and is a fundamental tenet of the Android Platform Security Model.

    > The majority of inter-process communication (IPC) on Android goes through Binder. Thus, memory unsafety vulnerabilities are especially critical when they happen in the Binder driver

    ... "Rust in the Linux kernel" (2021) https://security.googleblog.com/2021/04/rust-in-linux-kernel... :

    > [...] We also need designs that allow code in the two languages to interact with each other: we're particularly interested in safe, zero-cost abstractions that allow Rust code to use kernel functionality written in C, and how to implement functionality in idiomatic Rust that can be called seamlessly from the C portions of the kernel.

    > Since Rust is a new language for the kernel, we also have the opportunity to enforce best practices in terms of documentation and uniformity. For example, we have specific machine-checked requirements around the usage of unsafe code: for every unsafe function, the developer must document the requirements that need to be satisfied by callers to ensure that its usage is safe; additionally, for every call to unsafe functions (or usage of unsafe constructs like dereferencing a raw pointer), the developer must document the justification for why it is safe to do so.

    > We'll now show how such a driver would be implemented in Rust, contrasting it with a C implementation. [...]

    This guide with unsafe rust that calls into the C, and then with next gen much safer rust right next to it would be a helpful resource too.

    What of the post-docker container support (with userspaces also written in go) should be cloned to rust first?

  • The state of Flatpak security: major Projects are the worst?
    3 projects | /r/flatpak | 20 Feb 2023
    Rust-for-Linux issue tracker
  • rust devs in a nutshell
    2 projects | /r/ProgrammerHumor | 14 Feb 2023
  • Rustproofing Linux (Part 1/4 Leaking Addresses)
    2 projects | /r/rust | 10 Feb 2023
    Also, there already exists both issue: https://github.com/Rust-for-Linux/linux/issues/479
    2 projects | /r/rust | 10 Feb 2023
    Yes, I definitely agree that it's a problem that pr_info implicitly wraps its arguments in unsafe {}. I wrote my own Pull Request with a trival fix.
  • how to compile a rust "hello world" with kernel 6.1?
    2 projects | /r/rust | 23 Dec 2022
    Note that this template won't work with Linux 6.1, which has very minimal Rust support. You'll want the RustForLinux tree, or maybe Linux 6.2.
  • Rust in the 6.2 Kernel
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Nov 2022
    > Also we’re bringing NPM style supply chain problems to the kernel now?

    Nope. They've thought that through.

    (In fact, cargo is only used to build test helpers. https://github.com/Rust-for-Linux/linux/blob/rust/Documentat...)

cxx

Posts with mentions or reviews of cxx. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-12-07.
  • Rust is having a positive effect in C/C++
    2 projects | /r/rust | 7 Dec 2023
    There are cxx and autocxx, what else do you propose to do?
    2 projects | /r/rust | 7 Dec 2023
    The Rust project doesn't need to have "will", people outside it can contribute to solve their own needs—such as it seems to be the case with https://cxx.rs/ .
  • Rust Cryptography Should Be Written in Rust
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Aug 2023
    We selected Qt as a cross-platform solution. The C++/Rust interface is the clunkiest and ugliest part of the application, and rather complex because some state is shared between several windows in the GUI and several threads in the backend, and any component might modify that state at any time, and updates have to be transmitted to the other components without introducing inconsistencies. Using cxx [1] helped a little, though.

    The project began in 2020, and I'm not sure what I'd choose as a GUI framework today – definitely not Qt Widgets, though.

    [1] https://cxx.rs/

  • Link a C static library to rust cargo project
    2 projects | /r/rust | 24 Jun 2023
    If the build process for the C library isn't too involved I recommend using cxx bridge (https://cxx.rs/) and letting cargo handle the build and linking. cxx basically allows you to describe the bidirectional interface (although it sounds like you only need 1 direction, which is fine too) in Rust code and it provides a "good enough" API for compiling C code inside the build.rs file.
  • ffizz: Build a Beautiful C API in Rust
    6 projects | dev.to | 20 Jun 2023
    The tooling for the first kind -- calling Rust from another language -- is a bit less developed, and tends to rely on code generation that doesn't necessarily produce a natural C API. cbindgen, uniffi, cxx, and Diplomat all take this course.
  • Best practices in creating a Rust API for a C++ library? Seeking advice from those who've done it before.
    7 projects | /r/rust | 26 May 2023
    I would like to utilize OMPL's functionality in Rust code, so I want to call into OMPL C++ code somehow in Rust. I've seen two (non-mutually-exclusive) options so far: - rust-cpp, which allows you to write C++ code in Rust within the cpp!() macro. - cxx, which allows you to define both sides of the FFI boundary manually (as opposed to bindgen's automatic generation).
  • Hey Rustaceans! Got a question? Ask here (20/2023)!
    4 projects | /r/rust | 15 May 2023
    I'm not sure how to do this in cxx; issues like https://github.com/dtolnay/cxx/issues/447 suggest that this isn't settled yet?
  • Hello r/Rust! We are Meta Engineers who created the Open Source Buck2 Build System! Ask us anything! [Mod approved]
    9 projects | /r/rust | 3 May 2023
    I use non-vendored dependencies for the Buck build in https://github.com/dtolnay/cxx.
  • Microsoft is rewriting core Windows libraries in Rust
    6 projects | /r/programming | 29 Apr 2023
    There's also the cpp and cxx crates for doing C++/Rust interop, but they probably aren't appropriate to use in all cases. The C ABI is definitely the safest way to go unless you're really trying to marry Rust and C++ code bases, not just writing library bindings.
  • How can I use rust libraries in C++
    2 projects | /r/cpp_questions | 16 Apr 2023
    There's also cxx (can't vouch for it personally but it claims to make things a lot easier) https://github.com/dtolnay/cxx

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Rust-for-Linux and cxx you can also consider the following projects:

cbindgen - A project for generating C bindings from Rust code

rust-bindgen - Automatically generates Rust FFI bindings to C (and some C++) libraries.

autocxx - Tool for safe ergonomic Rust/C++ interop driven from existing C++ headers

uniffi-rs - a multi-language bindings generator for rust

rust-cpp - Embed C++ directly inside your rust code!

jakt - The Jakt Programming Language

gccrs - GCC Front-End for Rust

rfcs - RFCs for changes to Rust

rustig - A tool to detect code paths leading to Rust's panic handler

ritual - Use C++ libraries from Rust

dafny - Dafny is a verification-aware programming language

PrawnOS - Libre Mainline Kernel and Debian for arm laptops