swift-bridge VS cacao

A bit late, but `swift-bridge` (https://github.com/chinedufn/swift-bridge) does this intelligently, and is probably what you're looking for.

4) Another route that I tried is to develop a simple terminal app using SwiftUI with a Xcode project to build that app + link against a Rust library compiled for iOS with the actual logic. I used swift-bridge for this and it works really well, to the point where I have a custom logger that you can simply use the print stuff to SwiftUI from Rust using the log crate. Once I have a bit more time, I will probably try figuring out how to clean this up a bit more.

Since Swift is your first target, I might recommend swift-bridge which can generate bindings for Rust async fns that Swift can call directly.

I'm working on getting my GUI crate (https://github.com/audulus/rui) working on iOS (https://github.com/audulus/rui-ios). Multitouch will be fun. Shout out to the excellent work in swift-bridge: https://github.com/chinedufn/swift-bridge.

So that class SwiftString was actually unused. I've removed it here https://github.com/chinedufn/swift-bridge/pull/33 .

Here's an example of a Rust library that exposes an async function that uses reqwest to make an API call, and a main.swift that calls that async function.

Have you tried Swift Bridge? https://github.com/chinedufn/swift-bridge

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