btleplug VS windows-rs

In case someone is curious: https://github.com/deviceplug/btleplug/pull/279/files

Is something wrong with https://github.com/deviceplug/btleplug or you haven't found it? You could also use bindings to platform libraries like https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs and https://github.com/rust-mobile/ndk if btleplug doesn't have something fundamental to you.

One of the worst/best parts of buttplug is that I ended up needed to maintain my own Bluetooth LE library: btleplug (https://github.com/deviceplug/btleplug).

Worst because working with bluetooth is always THE WORST, best because of the submissions and community that've grown around it.

There's 2 types of PRs to btleplug:

- People going "here's a PR but uh, why is the library named btleplWAIT WHAT"

- People going "here is a PR specifically to fix something in Buttplug thank you"

"In its dev branch"

I've always been annoyed at the cross-platform story for Bluetooth. GATT is one of my favorite protocols because it is so simple, but writing simple code against this simple protocol is _not_ portable:

iOS and macOS have CoreBluetooth, Linux has BlueZ, Windows has Windows.Devices.Bluetooth and Android has android.bluetooth.

I've seen a few projects trying to fix this, like https://github.com/deviceplug/btleplug, and I hope one of them becomes production ready.

But, that's an ongoing problem. In terms of "done", I think the next big milestone will be mobile app support. We work on mobile web browsers in a couple of different ways, but Buttplug still needs app support, both native and for things like cordova/react native/etc... The biggest issue there at the moment lies in our bluetooth library (btleplug, https://github.com/deviceplug/btleplug), because getting the FFI via JNI to android is going to suck (even though I can crib off Servo's WebBluetooth impl, which worked on Android).

I'd say Rust does have that big ticket ecosystem push. Microsoft has been embracing Rust lately, with things like official Windows bindings [1].

The bigger problem is just inertia: large game engines are enormous.

[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs

It's a shame that, unlike with Win32, using WinUI places pretty harsh restrictions on which programming languages and environments you can use. Only C# and C++ are supported, the latter only with Microsoft compilers. For everything else, including Rust[1], Python and MinGW C/C++, there is no answer for OP's question, and the effect of this on the visual consistency of the Windows desktop is obvious - there is none. Every third-party app uses a different toolkit with a different look and feel, because the library providing the standard look and feel simply isn't available to the majority of developers.

[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs/pull/1836

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs

On Windows you'd need to call the LoadLibraryEx method. You'd also need a crate to call Win32 functions, I suggest windows-rs.

windows-rs, Microsoft's crate wrapping the Windows API, already includes the WDK, the special sdk for creating kernel code.

On windows, I'll probably use https://github.com/gabdube/native-windows-gui or https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs both of them seem pretty solid.

*nod* It's an official Microsoft thing generated from official Microsoft API definition files. (The repo is at microsoft/windows-rs on GitHub.)

Microsoft offers official "bindings" to Win32 APIs through win32metadata. However, until recently, it did not include metadata for kernel-level functions or WDK. In early 2021, an issue was raised through windows-rs regarding this limitation, but progress was slow until now. Microsoft has finally released official metadata for WDK, which can be found on the wdkmetadata repository. The latest comment on the issue thread can be found here:

Is something wrong with https://github.com/deviceplug/btleplug or you haven't found it? You could also use bindings to platform libraries like https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs and https://github.com/rust-mobile/ndk if btleplug doesn't have something fundamental to you.