Important note: this article is outdated! Go to http://zsiciarz.github.io/24daysofrust/ for a recent version of all of 24 days of Rust articles. The blogpost here is kept as it is for historical reasons.

In this penultimate episode of the 24 days of Rust article series we will focus on using Rust code from other languages. Since Rust libraries can expose a C API and calling conventions, using them isn't very different from using regular C libraries. A lot of programming languages have some kind of an FFI mechanism, allowing them to use libraries written in other language(s). Let's see a few examples!

Important note: this article is outdated! Go to http://zsiciarz.github.io/24daysofrust/ for a recent version of all of 24 days of Rust articles. The blogpost here is kept as it is for historical reasons.

Today I'm not going to focus on any specific tool or library. Instead this blogpost will be a showcase of cool things built with Rust. Even though the language is still before 1.0 (but we're getting there!), there are already a few interesting projects out in the wild.

And I don't mean only development libraries - I've been writing about them for the last three weeks :-)

Important note: this article is outdated! Go to http://zsiciarz.github.io/24daysofrust/ for a recent version of all of 24 days of Rust articles. The blogpost here is kept as it is for historical reasons.

The rust-crypto crate is a collection of a lot of cryptography primitives and algorithms. There are tools for calculating hashes, verifying data integrity, encryption etc. One disclaimer - it hasn't had a proper security audit yet and although the algorithms are well known and researched, the library itself might have security bugs. But which one doesn't?

Important note: this article is outdated! Go to http://zsiciarz.github.io/24daysofrust/ for a recent version of all of 24 days of Rust articles. The blogpost here is kept as it is for historical reasons.

ZeroMQ is a language-independent messaging solution. It's not a full-fledged system such as for example RabbitMQ, basically it's just a transport layer. From the programmer's perspective working with it doesn't differ much from ordinary sockets, but there's a lot of power hidden underneath. The zeromq crate is a native Rust implementation and while still lacking a lot of features, it is already usable today.

Important note: this article is outdated! Go to http://zsiciarz.github.io/24daysofrust/ for a recent version of all of 24 days of Rust articles. The blogpost here is kept as it is for historical reasons.

A few days ago the Rust subreddit got excited about the rebirth of rusti - an interactive shell for Rust. Such interpreters (sometimes called REPLs - read-eval-print loop) are the bread and butter of dynamic languages like Lisp, Python or Ruby. But that is not a requirement - as Haskell demonstrates with its GHCi, you can have a REPL for a statically typed, compiled language too. rusti is an attempt to build such an interpreter for Rust.