[libcamera-devel] Rust?

[Laurent Pinchart]

Hello,

On Friday, 7 December 2018 15:23:30 EET rugk wrote:
> Hi,
> just a question: did you consider writing the project (at least partially)
> in rust?
> 
> It is a type- and memory-safe language. It avoid common (memory) errors and
> makes multithreading easy At least for parsers or security-critical code it
> would be a good idea to use it.
> 
> And yes, you can perfectly embed it into c (and I guess, also c++) or embed
> c into it.

Yes, we have considered rust, and discussed it with different stakeholders 
(including ChromeOS developers who are usually big proponents of rust). In the 
end we decided to go for C++ as a middle ground. Compared to C we believe it 
will offer more safety, while compared to rust it should be a more familiar 
language to the community of low-level V4L2 developers.

I would personally be ready to give rust a try and go through the learning 
curve, but given my lack of experience with the language I didn't want to 
advocate for it based only on second-hand information. The choice of 
programming language needs to be a very careful decision as it can alienate 
part of our target audience.

-- 
Regards,

Laurent Pinchart