FFI tricks in Rust programming Language

How to do a trick on your Rust compiler to allow external (Foreign Language - FFI) functions

Rust is cool programming language which you can easily plugin to other languages ( Foreign Languages) .

Some of the FFI (Foreign language Interface) methods to call rust programs from C programming and Python programming languages are explained here.

Rust - Two things you should know for allowing Foreign language to call

#[no_mangle]
You might see lot of libraries using #[no_mangle] procedural macro.
The #[no_mangle] inform the Rust compiler that this is foreign language function and not to do anything weird with the symbols of this function when compiled because this will called from from other languages. This is needed if you plan on doing any FFI. Not doing so means you won’t be able to reference it in other languages.

extern

The extern keyword is used in two places in Rust. One is in conjunction with the crate keyword to make your Rust code aware of other Rust crates in your project, i.e. extern crate lazy static. The other use is in foreign function interfaces (FFI).

read more extern

how to create a shared object ie .so file from your Rust program ?

We can create a library in Rust using command below command

We are required to update the Cargo.toml

[dependencies]
[lib]
name = "callc"
crate-type = ["staticlib", "cdylib"]

cdylib is important crate type to specifiy in the Cargo.toml.
--crate-type=cdylib, #[crate_type = "cdylib"] - A dynamic system library will be produced. This is used when compiling a dynamic library to be loaded from another language. This output type will create *.so files on Linux, *.dylib files on macOS, and *.dll files on Windows.

Read more on this here linkage

Cargo new callc

//lib.rs
#[no_mangle]
pub extern fn hello(){
  println!("hello world inside rust ");
}
          

as we discussed earlier , since we use #[no_mangle], we can directly go ahead and compile it.
cargo build --release

How to check the generate .so file ?

A file with extension “.so” will generated in you target->release library.

run the below command to verify the function in the shared object.
$nm -D ‘filename.so’ | grep ‘function_name’

Our external function name is available in the shared object file created.

Create a C program for calling the shared object ( .so file)

create C program to call the hello function in your ‘src’ folder.

hello.c

#include<stdio.h>
#include "hello.h" /*header file to be included

/* the main C program to call the hello function
/* hello function is resides in the .so ( shared object) file

int main(void){
   hello();
}

Below header file needs to be created in your ‘src’ folder

hello.h

/*the header include file should have the function declaration.

void hello();

We should link the .so file while compiling the c program. The below command will link and compile the program.

While compiling the C program, link the .so file the ‘release’ folder.

gcc -o hello hello.c -L. -Isrc /home/naveen/rustprojects/callc/target/release/libcallc.so

Your C program should get compiled and 'hello’e executable should be generated.

How do you call a Rust program from Python.

We are going to use the crate pyo3 for creating python modules.

create the projectfolder using cargo
cargo projectname --lib

Your Cargo.toml file should be updated as below in library and dependency sections.

[lib]
name = "string_sum"
crate_type = ["cdylib"]

[dependencies.pyo3]
 version = "0.7.0"
 features = ["extension-module"]

update the lib.rs with the below code:

use pyo3::prelude::*;
use pyo3::wrap_pyfunction;

#[pyfunction]
///format the 2 numbers as string
fn sum_as_string(x:usize,y:usize) -> PyResult<String>{
    Ok((x+y).to_string())
}

#[pymodule]
fn string_sum(py:Python,m:&PyModule) -> PyResult<()>{
    m.add_wrapped(wrap_pyfunction!(sum_as_string))?;
    Ok(())
}

You can build the Rust program using Cargo build --release

This will create .so object in your cargo release folder. You might need to rename the file libstring_sum.so to string_sum.so

Now you can start import the module to the python interpreter and starting using the function string_sum

You might need to use python3 or 3+ interpreters for pyo3 to work.
As screenshot shows below , you can import the functions defined in the Rust module and use them in python.

One of powerful usage of Enum in Rust - Part1

Rust programming - Enum inside Struct

You might have come across this scenario in programming where you want to restrict a field type to restricted custom types.

Especially when you are working with APIs, the some of the field types can be one of the multiple custom types. You don’t want to accept the types other than defined custom types. enum can help you in these scenarios.
,eg event types can be ‘pullevent’, 'pushevent", ‘keypress’,‘mouseevvent’ etc

Example progarm

#[derive(Debug)]
///enum defined for vechicle type field
enum Oneoftwo{
    Car(String),
    Bus(String),
   
}
///struct defined for vehicle.
///Here we are using the defined enum as a type for a field in the struct
struct Vehicle{
    type1:Oneoftwo,
    price:i32,
}
///implementation for the vechile to create new instances
impl Vehicle {
    fn new(type1:Oneoftwo,price:i32) -> Vehicle{
        Vehicle{
            type1,
            price,
        }
    }
}

///main program to demostrate how to use enum inside a struct
fn main() {
    ///creating instances of the struct object
    let honda = Vehicle::new(Oneoftwo::Car("honda".to_string()),4000);
    let tata = Vehicle::new(Oneoftwo::Bus("Tata".to_string()),10000);
     
    println!("{:?},{:?}",honda.type1,honda.price);
    println!("{:?},{:?}",tata.type1,tata.price);
}

output:
Car("honda"),4000
Bus("Tata"),10000

Learn Python ,RUST and C - blog post 2

Understanding Data Types in Python,Rust and C progamming languages.

I am not sure whether I can cover all data types comparison in one blog post. So I might be doing it in multiple blog posts.
Standard Data Types:*

• Numbers.
• String.
• List.
• Tuple.
• Dictionary.

Numbers Datatypes
**Python programming **

Type	format	description
int	a = 10	signed integer
long	356L	Long integers
float	a = 12.34	floating point values
complex	a = 3.14J	(J) Contains integer in the range 0 to 255

The variable types are dynamically typed in python.So when you assign a value to a variable, python compiler determines the type of the variable.
But once the type is defined , the defined operations can only be performed for that particular type.
but you can change the type of the variable by assigning a different value. So in python it is the developer responsibility to maintain and make sure type of the variable intact through out the program.
For example,

>a = 10;
>a = "naveen" //allowed
>a = a + 1 // not allowed
>a = 11  //allowed
>a = a +1 // now this is allowed

**Rust programming **:

Length	signed	unsigned
8bit	i8	u8
16bit	i16	u16
32bit	i32	u32
64bit	i64	u64
128 bit	i128	u128
arch	isize	usize

signed and unsigned means whether a number can be -ve or +ve.
Each signed variant can store numbers from -(2^{n -1}) to 2^n-1
unsigned variants can vary from 0 to 2^n-1
eg: u8 means 0 to 2^8-1 = 128
signed means -2^8-1 to 2^8-1
Rust’s floating-point types are f32 and f64, which are 32 bits and 64 bits in size, respectively.
In the below example we assigned a value 129 to varialble ‘b’ which is of ‘i8’ ,so the program won’t get compiled.

fn main(){
   let a:i8 = 127;
   let b:i8= 129;  //this will cause overflow.
   let c:f32=123.32;
   let d:i8 = -127;
   let e:u8 = 127;

  println!("{}.{},{},{},{}",a,d,c,e,b);
}

when you compile the program,

error: literal out of range for `i8`
 --> datatype.rs:3:13
  |
3 |   let b:i8= 129;
  |             ^^^
  |
  = note: #[deny(overflowing_literals)] on by default

String:
Strings in python can be denoted by single quotes(’), double quotes("), triple quotes(""").

name1    = 'naveen'
name2    = "davis"
fullname = """naveen davis
                       vallooran"""

It possible to access the characters in a string using their index in python.

nam1[0] prints the character 'n'

Learn Python ,Rust and C - blog post 1

Learning Python ,Rust , C programming together

I have seen in different forums that people ask following questions " Why should I learn multiple programming language ?" or “Should I learn C or Python or JavaScript ?”.
My opinion would be , you can concentrate on one language and learn it deep. But as a developer some point of time it is important that to learn multiple programming languages and understand the difference and know where these languages are strong. This would helps you take decision on which language to use for your application.

Python Hello world : you can run this program from a python interpreter or save the program in in file and run with python.
install python - python

//python programming 
print("hello world")

Rust Hello world
The below Rust program needs to be saved in filename.rs and compiled with Rust compiler.t
Please follow the link for Rust installation How to install rust

///Rust programming 
fn main(){
 println!("hello world");
}

or You can create a rust programs using Cargo.
The link will help you to install cargo - Cargo

C Hello world
You preferred to have GCC compiler to generate C program executable.
installation -
Ubuntu GCC installation
Windows GCC

The program can be saved in a helloworld.c and compile and execute as below .

#include<stdio.h>
int main(){
    printf("hello world\n");
}

Python	Rust	C
Interpreting language	compiled language	compiled language
platform independent	cross platform individual building or compilation for each platform that it supports,	platform dependent
Strongly typed dynamically typed	strongly typed and dynamically typed	weekly typed and statically typed
objected oriented	Object-Oriented Programming is a way of modeling programs that originated with Simula in the 1960s and became popular with C++ in the 1990s. There are many competing definitions for what counts as OOP, and under some definitions, Rust is object-oriented; under other definitions, it is not.	structural language
inbuilt garbage collector	no separate garbage collector,but memory management is done automatically in compile time	manual memory management