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qmlrsng

Qt Quick bindings for Rust, based on libqmlbind.

The crate libqmlbind-sys wraps libqmlbind C library in Rust and exposes an unsafe API. The goal of qmlrsng is to create a safe abstraction over the libqmlbind-sys crate.

NOTE: This create is empty for the moment, waiting for a workable libqmlbind-sys crate.

Synopsis

Rust is a fantastic programming language. It exposes high level features that can be found in, say, Python, while retaining the low level control that C offers. In addition, the type system and ownership model is a strong ally and prevents issues that only static anaylizers might detect in C/C++.

C and C++ does offer great libraries though, one of them being Qt which is increasingly used in the embedded industry, mostly through Qt Quick and QML. Wrapping Qt in Rust has been tried but is quite difficult and painful, due to the C++ aspect of Qt.

Furthermore, I believe QML is becoming more interesting than Qt for new projects. It is a framework to create modern applications, on any device from phone to full car infotainment systems to desktops. Being able to use Qt Quick / QML from Rust would certainly have a stronger impact than Qt. Additionally, since code can be written in QML directly, shortcomings of a Rust wrapper could be overcome by writting some QML, something which would not be possible with Qt.

While Rust has an easy way to interface with C code through its Foreign Function Interface (ffi), C++ code cannot be used directly. This makes it hard to come up with a Rust wrapper to QML, see for example qmlrs.

Fortunately, Rust is not the only language wanting to access the power of QML. libqmlbind was written as a C wrapper to QML to be used by Ruby. An issue for qmlrs suggested re-writting it over libqmlbind; Since I am looking for excuses to write Rust code, I decided to give it a try.

Organization

This repository contains two crates. The first one is libqmlbind-sys which simply exposes libqmlbind's C interface as (unsafe) Rust. It's source was generated using bindgen.

The second crate is qmlrsng for qmlrs "next generation". I liked the qmlrs name but did not wanted to confuse anybody by using qml-rs so simply appended ng. I'm open to name suggestions! This crate should be a safe wrapper for libqmlbind-sys. It is empty for now until the unsafe wrapper is more complete.

Licensing

The code in these two libraries is dual-licensed under the MIT license and the Apache License (version 2.0). See LICENSE-APACHE and LICENSE-MIT for details.