I'd like to write up some documentation and best practices for integrating Rust into existing software projects. I expect most of the focus will be on integrating into C and C++ projects, but there's certainly room for information about integrating Rust into projects written in other languages.
As a first cut I'm just going to link the existing work I know about in this space.
I've been heavily involved in the planning work of integrating Rust code into Firefox. We are shipping some Rust code (an mp4 parser) currently, but it's not enabled by default if you build Firefox from source. There are large in-progress projects to use parts of Servo in Firefox which will bring in a lot more Rust code. These projects are all working with the infrastructure we built, so our foundation seems sound.
Firefox uses autoconf and GNU make (not automake), but with a lot of custom
scaffolding. We elected to build our Rust code using cargo to make things
work as expected for Rust developers. This has worked very well once we
ironed out a few wrinkles. There's some documentation
on how to add new Rust code to Firefox available. Under the hood the build
system mostly just invokes cargo
to build a static library containing all the Rust code, then links that
into the final binary.
We elected to vendor all Rust crate dependencies from crates.io into our
repository, since the historical position has been that the Firefox build
should not need to touch the internet. We used cargo vendor to do so. This requires the cargo that
shipped with Rust 1.12 with support for source replacement.
Geoffroy Couprie gave a talk at RustConf 2016 about integrating Rust into the VLC media player. He wrote a VLC plugin in Rust.
VLC uses automake. Geoffroy integrated the Rust code as a static library, built by cargo, using standard automake boilerplate. (TODO: expand on this)
A large part of the presentation was on the challenges of integrating with the existing C APIs. TODO: write up some of that.
Sebastian Dröge gave a talk at GStreamer Conference 2016 on writing a GStreamer element in Rust. He also wrote a pair of blog posts on it: one, two. The GStreamer plugin he wrote is available.
TODO: write up some of the interesting bits.