On 07/06/2015 17:23, Marvin Humphrey wrote:
Rust is fascinating. I wish I had time to learn it in depth right
now. Since I don't know it cold, I can only offer abstract feedback.
I'm only starting to learn Rust and I don't have the intention to pursue the
implementation of Rust bindings, at least for now. I mainly found it a nice
exercise in learning the language.
Here's a refined version with some additional comments:
https://gist.github.com/nwellnhof/299dd7315b8b54ac4e3d
For Go, we haven't quite
nailed it yet because the subtyping model, once it supports
overriding, will produce non-idiomatic behavior that Go programmers
will find surprising.
What do you mean exactly?
To what extent will this Rust proof-of-concept yield idiomatic Rust
APIs, with regards to the following concerns?
I don't know enough about Rust to really judge what is idiomatic. But our
single inheritance model will never map cleanly to language like Rust. A
Clownfish project will use a class hierarchy with virtual method dispatch and
downcasting for many problems that a Rust programmer would solve with
enumerated (algebraic) types and pattern matching.
* naming conventions
This shouldn't be hard. I added some uppercase names to avoid name clashes
which the Rust compiler even warns about.
* method signatures
I think it's best to pass object arguments as trait objects because Rust can
implicitly a cast a struct to every trait it implements. This should mostly
remove the need for manual upcasting. As an optimization, final classes could
be passed directly as structs.
* object lifetimes
This shouldn't be a problem because the Clownfish bindings don't store any
references internally.
* use of host types, such as host strings not Clownfish strings
Shouldn't be a problem. With Rust, we can probably wrap string arguments
without copying like we do in the Perl bindings.
* package layout and distribution
For Rust, I'm not sure whether it's better to use parcel/final-class-name or
the full class name for namespaces.
> * subtyping behavior
If you mean to subtype Clownfish classes from the host language, I think this
is a feature that we should consider to drop.
Nick
