[Libguestfs] [libnbd PATCH] RFC: Add bindings for Rust language

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Mon, Jul 08, 2019 at 11:20:44AM +0200, Martin Kletzander wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 08, 2019 at 09:58:20AM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> >The patch seems OK in general.
> >
>
> The libnbd-sys part is actually complete.  Well, except the build
> script, but that one is not completely necessary.  And the
> documentation.
>
> The wrappers are missing quite a few things to be usable, but it
> should not be *that* difficult once someone wants to play with it.
>
> What bothers me a lot is the way I am composing some of the strings.
> The only way why I shamelessly sent this was that the code runs once
> to generate the file and it is not part of the resulting product =)

(See below)

> >On Sun, Jul 07, 2019 at 11:39:29PM +0200, Martin Kletzander wrote:
> >>The way the code is generated is also not nice, I wish there was
> >>more code actually written in some files and not generated by the
> >>generator (as much hard-coded static strings as possible), maybe
> >>similarly to the states.c, I don't know.
> >
> >Can you expand on what you mean by this?
> >
>
> For example the `impl` blocks can be combined from different
> modules/files, so the implementations that are just constant (not
> generated dynamically, just static strings printed out) can be in a
> separate file instead of being written every time by the generator.

This is the way we structure other bindings, eg in the Python bindings
python/handle.c contains non-generated methods such as nbd_create and
nbd_close, while the generated methods are placed in python/methods.c.

I don't know how easy that is to achieve in Rust.  Some programming
languages make it really hard to divide implementations across files
(hello Perl).

> Maybe some substrings could be identified to be common and then
> copied from a file instead of duplicating the data.  But this is not
> needed.

I'm a bit unclear what "strings" (above) and "substrings" means in
this context.  Do you mean actual string constants?

Rich.

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