[the__alchemist]

I wonder why they didn't immediately FFI it: C is the easiest lang to write rust binding for. It can get tedious if using many parts of a large API, but otherwise is straightforward.

I write most of my applications and libraries in Rust, and lament that most of the libraries I wish I would FFI are in C++ or Python, which are more difficult.

Protobuf sounds like the wrong tool. It has applications for wire serialization and similar, but is still kind of a mess there. I would not apply it to something that stays in memory.

[vlovich123]

It’s trivial to expose the raw C bindings (eg a -sys crate) because you just run bindgen on the header. The difficult part can be creating safe, high-performance abstractions.

[kleton]

>Protobuf sounds like the wrong too This sort of use for proto is quite common at google

[kccqzy]

No it’s not common for two pieces of code within a single process to communicate by serializing the protobuf into the wire format and deserializing it.

It’s however somewhat common to pass in-memory protobuf objects between code, because the author didn’t want to define a custom struct but preferred to use an existing protobuf definition.

[hn_go_brrrrr]

I agree it's not super common, but Boq's in-process RPC feature encourages this pattern.

[1718627440]

Except it is not a remote procedure call.