ritual VS rust-bindgen

For your inspiration to get c++ code in a crate: https://github.com/rust-qt/examples uses ritual build https://github.com/rust-qt/ritual which integrates qt c++ stuff into the above cargo qt rust examples. I would like to highlight the todo list example. Build and run it verbosely with "--verbose --verbose".

It is great to see how many people want to bring Qt support to Rust and are trying to do so, and I hope that these folks succeed, but it’s wearisome to me how they each create a new project instead of working with others who are already in this problem space. Of the half-dozen or so[0] existing attempts so far to create Qt bindings to Rust, none of them have actually succeeded because they’ve either been abandoned midway or limit their support to QML. Ritual[1] is the only crate I’ve seen that attempts to actually expose the whole Qt API, but it’s pretty awful to use, incomplete, and dead.

Rust doesn’t need more Qt crates. It needs one Qt crate that is complete and works well. (Or, ideally, a native Rust cross-platform GUI crate that works as well as Qt, but that’s an even longer and harder task.)

[0] https://lib.rs/search?q=qt

[1] https://github.com/rust-qt/ritual

Just wanted to add another vote for https://github.com/rust-qt/ritual that 0OOO00000OO00O0O0OOO/ mentioned below.

There was a QT library, rust-qt (that was officially supported I believe), the bindings being made with Ritual. There is an open issue for supporting qt6, which I'm also awaiting; https://github.com/rust-qt/ritual/issues/109.

Rust supports two kinds of FFI: calling into Rust from another language; and calling into another language from Rust. Most of the thought and tooling that exists right now is organized around the second kind. For example, bindgen is a popular tool that generates useful Rust wrappers from a C or C++ header file.

I have looked into bindgen, but found that it would not be feasible due to OMPL not having a C API, just C++.

Yes! Are you running LLVM version 16.0.0 or newer, by any chance? I believe this is an issue with some builds of bindgen with newer versions of LLVM. See https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-bindgen/issues/2488

On native, you have to define a C API, probably using a header file. Even if both sides are implemented in Rust, they have to speak that C API (documentation).

Bindgen has some functionality for direct talk to C++ https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-bindgen

I am trying to use rust-bindgen (https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-bindgen) to link a static C library (say `libexample.a`) which is compiled in a separate project with CMake. The `libexample.a` depends on other libraries (for example `libcurl.a`) installed on the system.

It looks like the guy you're replying too was kind of an ass, but I do want to point out for anyone else reading that that's not actually that much of a technical limitation: rust code can natively call C code. The main thing you need is a translation of the C library's header file so rustc knows what C functions and structs exist, and that can be automatically generated with bindgen.

It's quite the different approach, but you could consider using bindgen instead.

Use bindgen or CXX to create Rust bindings for the C or C++ libraries.