Interoperability
Interoperability between Rust and C code is always dependenton transforming data between the two languages.For this purposes there are two dedicated modulesin the stdlib
calledstd::ffi
andstd::os::raw
.
std::os::raw
deals with low-level primitive types that canbe converted implicitly by the compilerbecause the memory layout between Rust and Cis similar enough or the same.
std::ffi
provides some utility for converting more complextypes such as Strings, mapping both &str
and String
to C-types that are easier and safer to handle.
Neither of these modules are available in core
, but you can find a #![no_std]
compatible version of std::ffi::{CStr,CString}
in the cstr_core
crate, andmost of the std::os::raw
types in the cty
crate.
Rust type | Intermediate | C type |
---|---|---|
String | CString | char |
&str | CStr | const char |
() | c_void | void |
u32 or u64 | c_uint | unsigned int |
etc | … | … |
As mentioned above, primitive types can be convertedby the compiler implicitly.
unsafe fn foo(num: u32) {
let c_num: c_uint = num;
let r_num: u32 = c_num;
}
Interoperability with other build systems
A common requirement for including Rust in your embedded project is combiningCargo with your existing build system, such as make or cmake.
We are collecting examples and use cases for this on our issue tracker inissue #61.
Interoperability with RTOSs
Integrating Rust with an RTOS such as FreeRTOS or ChibiOS is still a work inprogress; especially calling RTOS functions from Rust can be tricky.
We are collecting examples and use cases for this on our issue tracker inissue #62.