In a larger application this is not much of an issue as the glue code between Kotlin and Rust can be kept fairly small. The rust jni and ffi libraries make this fairly safe though and later on we will link to some patterns we use in Visly to make this easier. A lot is happening there as we need to transform the string from a jni string to a C string to a rust string and back. We then define a basic function which constructs a new string given an input string. There are a couple other things to notice here, because we are interfacing with Kotlin we have to make use of C calling conventions and JNI, this means we have to tell rust not to mangle any names (with #). We start off with telling rust that this file will only be used when targeting Android with # and because JNI required CamelCase function names which are not standard on Rust we also allow that with #. Next we have to make sure rust is installed on our system. With a typical install on macOS this should be set to ~/Library/Android/sdk. One thing to make sure is that you have set up your $ANDROID_HOME environment variable. We will assume you already have a working Android toolchain, if not you should download Android Studio and set it up according to any other Android guide. (We wrote a similar article for iOS) Getting set upīefore we get started we need to make sure we have the rust toolchain set up. As to why, the most compelling reason for us at Visly is that it enables us to share code between Android and iOS in a performant and safe manner, in a language much easier to work with than C++. If you’re an Android developer you may be asking yourself how and why you would make use of rust on Android. If you haven’t already I suggest having a look at the great learning material, but keep in mind that can take a while to get into and appreciate so I suggest writing more than just a hello world. Built by Mozilla to power the next generation high performance cross platform software. You may have heard of rust, it’s a systems programming language designed for memory safety and speed.

Rust apk download android