Autogenerating Rust-JS Bindings with UniFFI (opens in new tab)

(hacks.mozilla.org)

92 pointsnaansequitur2y ago16 comments

16 comments

12 comments · 7 top-level

leononame2y ago· 3 in thread

I'm not a rust dev, but this language is moving so fast into new territories that I'm more and more interested in picking it up.

Could UniFFI be used to generate native modules to use rust with react native?

The web story with wasm already looks like it could eat away a big chunk of JS's share if WebIDL becomes a thing.

yvgny2y ago

Yes, you can do that. UniFFI allows you to generate Kotlin and Swift wrappers, which you can wrap in a RN wrapper. We did this at work for a cross-platform mobile app, it's a bit of a headache to create because that are some subtleties with async or these kind of things, and they are handled differently in the UniFFI wrappers and RN wrapper, but for relatively simple libs I find it pretty convenient.

pzo2y ago

Wouldn't this negate the effort of having cross platform Rust Module that now you have to manually create RN wrapper to autogenerated Kotlin and Swift wrappers? Also I think all previous RN bindings from JS to Swift, Java are async in nature end comes with performance penalty (serialization back and forth and async queue)?

Would be great if React Native team extend TurboModules to support generating Rust interop instead of just C++ - there are many truely cross platform rust modules (including support for iOS/android) than c++ and cargo makes much better developer experience than cmake.

nicoburns2y ago

What would be really awesome would be a tool for generating JSI bindings to Rust code. Then you wouldn't need to go via Kotlin or Swift. I believe there are no technical barriers to such a tool. Someone just needs to implement it.

2 more replies

dustymcp2y ago· 2 in thread

why is this big news weve had this stuff for decades now ?

afavour2y ago

We’ve had a library for generating JS bindings for Rust code for decades?

slimsag2y ago

Agreed, I doubt it's been a decade.. though maybe close-ish

wasm-bindgen does something similar though, right?

1 more reply

jamil72y ago

I built a proof of concept with UniFFI recently at work. The futures/async support is quite immature and for me meant declaring part of my functions in the UDL file and partly in proc macros, but it's not clear what is supported where. It's still a little early, but is generally a really cool project.

TheRealPomax2y ago

I'm using https://koffi.dev for running rust-compiled code in Node.js, so if this -in any way- means there's going to be something that just works(tm) as part of the standard JS stack, rather than having to rely on third parties to "mostly" implement FFI, that'd be amazing.

willquack2y ago

Similar to the PythonMonkey project which provides high level bindings to SpiderMonkey from Python. Although its implemented in C++, I wonder if it or other projects like it could benefit from UniFFi

PythonMonkey lets you arbitrarily execute JS code like:

``` import pythonmonkey pythonmonkey.eval("(() => { console.log('hi from js'); })()") ``` for reference.

zengid2y ago

Did switching from "everything is synchronous" to "everything is asynchronous" break a lot of other UniFFI users? I keep hearing people recommend UniFFI as the solution for Easy-FFI™, but that sounds like a drastic change that might break folks downstream.

villgax2y ago

This what I actually want LLMs to do. Generate spec adhering code from one language to another

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse