rust-cpp VS cc-rs

I am the current passive maintainer of the cpp crate: https://github.com/mystor/rust-cpp

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).

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.

https://github.com/mystor/rust-cpp <- not a transpiler, but almost as good

Otherwise, C would never have achieved success in MS-DOS when all the stuff it was binding to at the time required blocks of inline assembly. (Crates like rust-cpp do exist, which allow "inline C++" in the same way that C++ allows inline assembly.)

Actually, you can make inline C++ macro in Rust. Similar unholy monstrosities exist for inline python, inline C, inline SQL, inline HTML,...

Here is a more serious project that allows to embed C++ code directly in your Rust code: https://github.com/mystor/rust-cpp

Don't underestimate the power of procedural macros: https://github.com/mystor/rust-cpp

Alright, thanks for all your ideas! I also found this mystor/rust-cpp, which apparently allows inline c++ as opposed to cxx. Having yet to try out any of these, I like the idea of inline code more. Thought now I feel I need to brush up my skills a bit more to try this stuff out.

It does support calling into other compilers and toolchains through build scripts and such. Take cc-rs[0] for example: this allows building C and C++ files natively without even calling an executable yourself.

In practice, I'd expect libraries to just call make/cmake/ninja for you, or (like openssl-sys) ask you to install the necessary libraries using your favourite package manager.

[0]: https://github.com/rust-lang/cc-rs

The cc crate (https://github.com/rust-lang/cc-rs) is widely used for compiling C code from Rust (often in a build.rs file for the purpose of wrapping a C library so that it can be used from Rust). However, I believe it generally does expect a C compiler to be present.

It might be quite tedious to compile static library manually every time we make changes in C code. The better solution is to instead utilize the cc crate, which provides an idiomatic Rust interface to the compiler provided by the host.

https://github.com/alexcrichton/cc-rs This crates lets you shell out to a C compiler when building your Rust project

> You're splitting hairs in a weird way. rustc cannot compile C code. zig can.

But why do I care? I don't use rustc directly, the build system of choice does. And very few of the major build systems have an issue handling multiple languages.

Cargo (rust's build system) supports build scripts and the community has already created C/C++ compiler hooks such as https://github.com/alexcrichton/cc-rs

rustup and cargo also provide easy cross-compilation support, too.

I think it's getting confused because link.exe is in your PATH. But it's not the link.exe it expects. Link tools are detected using the cc crate so it would need to be fixed there. Would you be willing to open an issue about this?

It’s not super well-documented, but there is an option to change this. --remap-path-prefix $(pwd)= in your RUSTFLAGS will usually do the trick. If you have any C dependencies you’ll also need similar things in CFLAGS, see https://github.com/alexcrichton/cc-rs/issues/593