Building an iOS App in Rust | Hacker News Reader

Building an iOS App in Rust

bignerdranch.com

106 pointsweinzierl10 comments

What is the advantage of using Rust for an iOS app over Swift, especially now that Swift is open source? I doubt the overheard of reference counting is going to be an issue for most iOS apps (although I'd be super interested to hear where it might).

The idea is to use it for cross platform libraries. Let's say you were building an RSS reader, you could reuse your same feed parsing code on Android, Windows, Mac, and Linux.

But with Swift riding on top of the LLVM infrastructure similar to Rust, cross platform libraries are also possible with the Swift toolchain, no?

Sure - this may be me more appealing if you prefer Rust as a language or wrote some existing code in it but still want to be able to target iOS.

Nothing about LLVM makes Swift inherently cross-platform. LLVM bitcode is not target independent.

I'm not sure I understand the relevance? Neither are rust libraries.

Not sure about exposing Swift to C itself, while Rust has a clear "call from C" story.

I think that's what was referred to.

I submitted this primarily because it gives a good overview what obstacle you have to overcome to actually integrate a native library (Rust, C or C++, all the same) into an iOS application. If that is a practical approach, I'm not sure. It's an interesting approach nevertheless.

For the Rust over Swift aspect:

What appeals to me about Rust (besides the safety first attitude) is that it is truly platform agnostic. With Swift I'd fear that I end up with primarily an iOS app that somehow runs on other platforms. Given the recent activities for bringing Swift to Non-Apple platforms my fear might be ill-founded?

Note that this is from 2015, the recent push to improve Rust's cross-compilation story may have made the info within obsolete.

> Note that this is from 2015

That's true. The submission is only the first part of a series that spans several months. I pasted the links below for convenience[1]. The last part (so far) is from April 14, 2016.

> he recent push to improve Rust's cross-compilation story may have made the info within obsolete.

Now that we have rustup [2], what is described in the first part should be much easier. I find it still worthwhile because it helps to understand what rustup does for you automatically. Researching this topic is actually how I found the article.

[1]

https://www.bignerdranch.com/blog/building-an-ios-app-in-rus...

[2] https://www.rustup.rs/

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