Rust-Windows Interoperability

[DrizztVD1]

Continuing the discussion from Rust beginner notes & questions:

Rust beginner notes & questions

I honestly wish I could do exactly that, but I don't use Rust enough to really contribute meaningfully. I've dabbled with it just long enough to determine that it won't help me in any future projects. Right now, for the kind of work I'm doing, the runtime overhead of C# for me is relatively unimportant compared to its productivity, which is the best of any language I've personally used. My next step up would be switching to F# on dotnet core, as that would both boost my productivity and perform…

Rust beginner notes & questions

This sounds like the core of your concerns, and to be honest, I think it is definitely an area Rust could do better at. Maybe next year we need to have a Windows domain working group to put some serious effort behind it. I think the challenge is that it seems like Rust / open source developers gravitate more towards Mac / Linux than your average desktop user so the numbers are skewed. Who knows, maybe one day Microsoft themselves might help out.

[withkittens]

@DrizztVD1

ready-to-use wrappers around the Win32 APIs

winapi is the crate for this. As it is auto-generated, it provides all available APIs.

@DrizztVD1

Does it have the ability to call COM yet?

Well, technically it does. ~3 years ago I played a bit with COM:

• super_clean_com.rs (ha, actually, not so)
• main.rs (how to use)

Note: com crate is abandoned by me, because a nice and idiomatic implementation will require an enormous amount of time and effort. Also, winapi became so much more useful since then.

Never had problems with UTF-16 personally, through. OsStrings or falling back to some custom wrapper around MultiByteToWideChar / WideCharToMultiByte do the thing.

[DrizztVD1]

The central argument in this discussion is shown below. Expand the above linked posts to read further. Be sure to create new linked posts as required.

@peter_bertok

For example, Rust Windows interop is… not pretty right now. There just isn’t the same kind of pre-packaged, ready-to-use wrappers around the Win32 APIs that C# has. Does it have the ability to call COM yet? DCOM+? Can you create a socket server with Active Directory Kerberos authentication? Can I validate a certificate against the machine trust store? Last time I checked, there were blocking issues for most of my use-cases, and to be honest I gave up after getting bogged down in all the niggling little issues related to UCS-16 string handling.

[juleskers]

The central miscommunication there seems to be one part (lack of) ecosystem maturity and two parts a difference of opinion between thin-std+crates vs fat-std, a discussion that has been going on since before Rust-1.0, without making any progress...

Rust makes a radically different choice than other languages, and apparently what the author was trying to do, on windows, aligns very well with the (windows-centric, fat-std,high level, mature) c# language, and less with the (cross-platform/*nix, thin-std, young) Rust language.

[retep998]

@withkittens

winapi is the crate for this. As it is auto-generated, it provides all available APIs.

winapi is not auto-generated, nor does it provide all available APIs. The goal is to provide all available APIs eventually, but Windows API is just so gosh darn huge.

Calling COM methods is quite easy, because winapi provides inherent methods to call the functions in the vtable, and abstractions like ComPtr make working with COM objects a lot simpler. The more complex COM stuff though is a bit lacking still in Rust.

[withkittens]

@retep998

winapi is not auto-generated, nor does it provide all available APIs. The goal is to provide all available APIs eventually, but Windows API is just so gosh darn huge.

Ah, okay, thank you for correcting me.