cacao VS prost

This is really specific, but for this point in the article:

> There’s a long guide on Embedding a Command-Line Tool in a Sandboxed App, so I followed that, and then slowly, painfully, factored Xcode out of it, so that I wouldn’t have to figure out how to get a 10GB Xcode install onto the CI machine (remember, you need to be signed in to an Apple ID to download Xcode, and there’s no way to do it from the command-line).

You could actually solve this with Rust and no Xcode whatsoever. cacao [1] and cargo-bundle [2] will produce an app bundle you could sign/notarize/distribute without needing to ever open Xcode.

[1] https://github.com/ryanmcgrath/cacao

I've had basic animation support in cacao for about a year now, but I don't think anybody even realizes it.

But I will reiterate what I say on many posts like these, which is that it would be even cooler if we could stop having a million projects reinvent this wheel - and I say this as someone who wrote a large Rust library that is backed by ObjC. madsmtm has an ongoing effort to put together a best in class ObjC Rust wrapper, which would be great to see even more support for.

MacOS; I have to call the AppKit API. I can use a library like this which offers Rust bindings for AppKit - otherwise I can write my own maybe?

Yes, you can: https://github.com/ryanmcgrath/cacao

We've been using Rust with protobuf, but had to write lots of conversions from protobuf struct to actual DTO, since prost generates Options for nested types, and does not really support custom types. So I extended prost with the options that we needed. I might aim to also support protoc-gen-validate.

I'm prototyping an alternative protobuf code generator, with the aim to support more configuration and options. Prost does not have any facilities for implementing extensions, so it's a fork with edits in every single component.