higher level bindings?

[goertzenator]

Hi, fascinating thing you've done here. Have you given any thought to higher level bindings? For example, decode an Erlang tuple into a Rust tuple with a single function.

Such bindings exist for C++ (https://github.com/goertzenator/nifpp), and it would be very interesting if they also existed for Rust.

Also, have you written any significant NIFs in Rust? Any major issues?

[edescourtis]

Rust seems like a perfect match for Erlang nifs. I would definitely use it if it had higher level bindings.

[erszcz]

Wow, nifpp looks great indeed! I've felt the inconvenience of manual type casting on the C / Rust boundary - there's definitely room for improvement over the bindgen-generated bindings there. Unfortunately, as of now I don't have plans on providing a higher level interface due to lack of time - this repo is just an experiment. I haven't used the approach in any significant project yet.

[goertzenator]

Thank you for your comments. I've only really discovered Rust this week, and monkeying with higher level bindings will be a great way for me to learn the language. Your work here will give me a huge leg-up.

I agree that Rust is a perfect match for Erlang nifs on many levels:

• NIFs are risky because they can bring down the VM with a segfault (I've personally done that many times ;). The safety of Rust reduces that risk significantly.
• Rust looks a bit Erlang-ish with its "match" operator and map/fold functions. This can lower the barrier for writing NIFs.
• I've seen people crash the VM by not really understand the relationship between terms and environments. I wonder if Rust can enforce some compile-time constraints to mitigate this? (I don't know, I'm still a Rust newby)