Rust 💙 GNOME Hackfest: Day 1

Hello everyone,

This is a report of the first day of the Rust 💙 GNOME Hackfest that we are having in Madrid at the moment. During the first day we had a round of introductions and starting outlining the state of the art.

A great view of Madrid’s skyline from OpenShine’s offices

At the moment most of the focus is around the gobject_gen! macro, the one that allows us to inherit GObjects. We already have basic inheritance support, private structure, signals and methods. The main outstanding issues are:

• Properties support, which danigm is working on
• Improve compiler errors for problems within the macro, which antonyo and federico worked on
• Interface implementation and declaration
• Cover more Rust<->GObject/GLib/C type conversion coverage

I’ve been focusing mostly on improving the support for the private structure of GObject classes. At the moment this is how you do it:

struct MyPrivateStruct {
        val: Cell<u32>,
}

gobject_gen! {
    class Foo {
        type InstancePrivate = MyPrivateStruct;
    }

    pub fn my_method(&self) {
        self.get_priv().val.set(30);
    }
}

Which I find rather cumbersome, I’m aiming at doing something like this:

gobject_gen! {
    class Foo {
        val: Cell<u32>;
    }

    pub fn my_method(&self) {
        self.val.set(30);
    }
}

Which is a bit more intuitive and less verbose. The private struct is generated behind the scenes and the de-referencing is done through the Deref trait. The challenge now is how to allow for default values for the private structure. This was done through the Default trait on the current implementation, but I’m not sure this is the best way forward to make this easy to use.

By the way, the hackfest is being kindly hosted by our friends at OpenShine, which besides being free software enthusiasts and supporters, are great at deploying kubernetes, Big Data and analytics solutions.