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Buttplug Rust - FFI for Other Languages

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FFI Implementations from the buttplug-rs Rust Sex Toy Control Library to other langauges.

FFI Implementations

The library currently implements FFI from Rust to the following languages:

Our current plans are to possibly expand to the following list of languages:

However, for most languages, we recommend natively implementing at Buttplug Client and having it connect to Intiface Central. This approach is outlined in the Buttplug Developer Guide.

Where did C# and JS go?

C# and JS have been moved back to the Buttplug C# and Buttplug JS repos, respectively. Usage of the FFI with these projects didn't work out for users very well, so they've been returned to being completely native client-only implementations, with embedded connections being deprecrecated in preference to having programs connect to Intiface Central.

Implementation Details

The Buttplug Rust FFI library exposes access to the Buttplug Client API of buttplug-rs. This allows creation of both in-process (i.e. run both a Buttplug client/server in the same process, including direct hardware access) and remote (i.e. use Buttplug Client to talk via Websockets/Pipes/etc to a remote Buttplug server) Buttplug Clients. From these clients, you can scan for and get back device objects, which allow for control of devices from the language of your choice.

The usable API surface of Buttplug is fairly small. The bulk of the library consists of internal configuration, protocol translation, and hardware communication. If the FFI layer seems small, that's because it is. There really aren't that many entry points into the library itself, which luckily makes building FFI easy.

For simple type conversion purposes, the FFI layer uses protobufs. Protobufs provide a simple, fast way to deal with type differences between many languages, and due to the low frequency of message updates in buttplug (we might send 100s of messages per second in a system with multiple devices, but usually its 10s), the overhead of the conversion process isn't too expensive for us. Flatbuffers were originally considered and implemented for C#, but ended up causing developer friction on bringup. We don't really need the ability to pick out fields to parse, as we'll always be using the full message in arguments.

For more information on FFI and Rust using intermediate serialization layers, check out the following articles:

The actual FFI layer consists of a few exposed cdecl functions (see the export.rs file for method definitions) that serve as message passing interfaces in and out of the system. These functions should handle being called from different threads.

Contributing

If you have issues or feature requests, please feel free to file an issue on this repo.

We are not looking for code contributions or pull requests at this time, and will not accept pull requests that do not have a matching issue where the matter was previously discussed. Pull requests should only be submitted after talking to qdot via issues on this repo (or on discourse or discord if you would like to stay anonymous and out of recorded info on the repo) before submitting PRs. Random PRs without matching issues and discussion are likely to be closed without merging. and receiving approval to develop code based on an issue. Any random or non-issue pull requests will most likely be closed without merging.

If you'd like to contribute in a non-technical way, we need money to keep up with supporting the latest and greatest hardware. We have multiple ways to donate!

License

This project is BSD 3-Clause licensed.


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