Rust+C in the same WASM binary

This repository was created to test the current state of the Rust nightly compiler for producing a compatible C ABI for the wasm32-unknown-unknown target with --Z wasm_c_abi=spec.

For context, this is the relevant tracking issue in Wasm Bingen.

This workspace contains a series of small examples of how to produce a single WASM binary with both C and Rust code that can call each other.

To see how to do it, check out the build.sh file in each of the crates in this workspace.

Build Strategies

The crates experiment with different build strategies, with increasing levels of complexity:

1. Linking Manually

   • A simple calculator with primitive data types and manual build

2. With CC Crate

   • The same calculator built with the CC crate

3. Libc and Heap

   • We use OpenBSD libc to implement the Mem function in the calculator and store/free a value in the heap from C with malloc and free

4. Wasm Bindgen

   • We create a Calculator struct with member functions and export it with Wasm Bindgen

5. Rust Bindgen

   • This is the same as the previous project, but instead of writing the Calculator struct manually, we generate the Rust bindings from the C header with Rust Bindgen, which is the recommended way to interact with C code from Rust.

6. Extern Types

   • This project experiments with the nightly feature extern types.

Running it

To see the examples in action, use your favorite local server:

npx serve

Then, visit http://localhost:3000 and click the example you want to see.

Future plans

1. Uniffi

   • I plan to add an example with Uniffi in the future.

2. Wgpu

   • I have used these strategies in my work to build a wgpu project that depends on C libraries. I plan to bring a minimal example of it here.

3. Combine different crates in a build script

   • C code coming from a crate and Rust code from another, link them by using linker flags in build.rs.

4. External C libs

   • Finally, let's bring an external C lib and combine all of the above.

Contributing

If you'd like to see any other scenario listed here, feel free to open an Issue or a PR.

If submitting a new example, create a numbered subfolder in the crates directory following the existing structure, and ensure your example builds correctly for both WASM and unit tests.

Finally, run cargo clippy and stick with the default rules.