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Title: The Rust Foundation Wants to Improve Rust and C++ Interoperability

Link: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/24/11/1...

The goal? "Make C++ and Rust interoperability easily accessible and
approachable to the widest possible audience." And the Rust Foundation's
"Interop Initiative" is specifically focused on the goal of interoperability
"within the same executable," through either inline embedding that allows
"integrated compilation", or foreign function interfaces. To that end, a
statement addressing "the challenges and opportunities in C++ and Rust
interoperability" was announced this week by the Rust Foundation. Pointing
out that the "Interop Initiative" was launched in February 2024 with a $1M
contribution from Google, it now "proposes a collaborative, problem-space
approach engaging key stakeholders from both language communities. "Rather
than prescribing specific solutions, this problem statement serves as a
foundation for community input and participation in shaping both the
strategic direction and tactical implementation of improved C++/Rust
interoperability." Their official problem statement outlines three "key
strategic approaches." - Improve existing tools and address tactical issues
to reduce interoperability friction and risk in the short term. - Build
consensus around long-term goals requiring changes to Rust itself and develop
the tactical approaches to begin pursuing them. - Engage with the C++
community and committee to improve the quality of interoperation for both
languages to help realize the mutual goals of safety and performance. And it
argues that interoperability "is essential to pursuing safety and performance
which is maintainable and scalable." A significant amount of development has
gone into libraries to facilitate interoperability with both C and C++, but
from the language and compiler level, the situation remains largely unchanged
from the early days of Rust. As the desire to integrate Rust into more C++
codebases increases, the value of making C++/Rust interoperability safer,
easier, and more efficient is rapidly increasing. While each language takes a
different overall approach, both view safety as an essential concern in
modern systems. Both Rust and C++ have language- and standard-library-level
facilities to improve safety in seemingly compatible ways, but significant
benefits are lost when transiting the foreign function interfaces (FFI)
boundary using the C ABI... The consequence of this increased cost to
interoperate means both C++ and Rust codebases are less able to access
valuable code that already exists in the other language, and the ability to
transition system components from one language to another is reduced outside
of existing C-like interface boundaries. Ultimately, this reduction in
freedom leads to worse outcomes for all users since technologists are less
free to choose the most effective solutions.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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