[ridiculous_fish]

> This is where build scripts come in. Our strategy will be for the Rust crate to use a build.rs build script and the cc crate to invoke the equivalent commands to our make invocation

Yikes - port the entire build system to cargo before you write a line of Rust. Now draw the reset of the owl!

Surely's there's an incremental path for the build as well? Perhaps if you're using CMake?

[pornel]

You can build Rust code as a static library and make the C build system consume that instead. This is the approach that librsvg took.

Moving C build to build.rs is not necessary. It's usually done only because people used to Cargo don't like bringing CMake along. If you were to publish this as a Rust crate, it'd be slightly easier for downstream Rust users to have one less external tool to install.

[Rusky]

There's a `cmake` crate that you could use from `build.rs` the same way, or you could go the other direction and have your existing build system invoke Cargo or rustc.