Rust: The state of the bindings

Slides at bilelmoussaoui.github.io/guadec-2023/

Presentation

• Software Engineer at Red Hat
• GNOME Developer
• Maintains too many Rust crates

What are the Rust bindings?

• Wrappers of the GObject based C libraries
• Safe and convenient to use
• Mostly automatically generated code with gir

Which bindings exists?

• gtk-rs-core: glib/gio, pango, cairo, graphene
• gtk4-rs: libadwaita, gtksourceview, libshumate, webkit6, libpanel, libspelling
• gtk3-rs: in maintenance mode
• others: poppler, soup3...

Who uses them?

• Approximately 35 GStreamer elements
• librsvg, RDW, rpm-ostree
• A lot of GTK apps: Paper Plane, Spot, Loupe, Pods, Amberol, Snapshot...

Who uses them?

Who uses them?

What about the rest of the platform?

• • zbus
  • busd: D-Bus broker
• ASHPD: Portals wrapper
• OO7: Replacement of libsecret
• libaperture: A GTK widget for cameras

What changed since last time?

GtkBuilderScope integration

					#[gtk::template_callbacks]
impl MyWidget {
	#[template_callback]
	fn button_clicked(&self, button: &gtk::Button) {
		println!("button clicked!")
	}

	#[template_callback]
	async fn some_other_callback(&self, button: &gtk::Button) {
		use ashpd::desktop::screenshot::Color;
		let color = Color::request().send().await.unwrap().response().unwrap();
		println!("{:#?}", color)
	}
}
				

What changed since last time?

Procedural macro for generating GObject properties boilerplate

					#[derive(glib::Properties, Default)]
#[properties(wrapper_type = super::CustomObject)]
pub struct CustomObject {
	#[property(get, set = Self::set_prop, construct)]
	prop: RefCell<String>,
}

#[glib::derived_properties]
impl ObjectImpl for CustomObject {}

impl CustomObject {
	fn set_prop(&self, value: &str) {
		*self.prop.borrow_mut() = format!("custom set: {}", value);
	}
}
				

What changed since last time?

gdk4-win32 bindings

What changed since last time?

Reduced allocations by introductions various collections types: glib::List,glib::SList, glib::Strv

What changed since last time?

• Improved documentations
  • List of properties and signals
  • Virtual and class methods support
• More chapters in the gtk4-rs book

What to look forward to?

• More procedural macros: signals, improved glib::wrapper!
• i18n support without going through gettext-rs
• Reduce allocations when interacting with strings / collections
• Support the new introspection annotations

What to look forward to?

A new release!

Reach out

• Website: https://gtk-rs.org
• GitHub: https://github.com/gtk-rs
• Matrix: https://matrix.to/#/#rust:gnome.org

Thank you!

Any questions?