Autocxx

This project is a tool for calling C++ from Rust in a heavily automated, but safe, fashion.

The intention is that it has all the fluent safety from cxx whilst generating interfaces automatically from existing C++ headers using a variant of bindgen. Think of autocxx as glue which plugs bindgen into cxx.

Intended eventual interface

It's intended that eventually this exposes a single procedural macro, something like this:

class Bob {
public:
    Bob(std::string name);
    ...
    void do_a_thing();
}

use autocxx::include_cpp;

include_cpp!(
    Header("base/bob.h"),
    Allow("Bob"),
)

let a = ffi::base::bob::make_unique("hello".into());
a.do_a_thing();

The existing cxx facilities are used to allow safe ownership of C++ types from Rust; specifically things like std::unique_ptr and std::string.

Current state of affairs

At present, this macro does not work, for two reasons:

• because there is no equivalent of the cxxbridge tool that knows how to expand the include_cpp! macro into a cxx::bridge mod (which in turn is then used to generate .cc and .h files.)
• lots of nasty hard-coded nonsense around include paths etc.

However, this project does contain test code which does this end-to-end. At present, one of the many tests actually passes, proving that for the simplest imaginable case it is possible to tie bindgen into cxx.

Build environment

This crate is not yet on crates.io and currently depends on a hacked-up version of bindgen. It may soon come to depend upon a hacked-up version of cxx as well.

To try it out,

• Fetch the code using git.
• cargo test

This will fetch a specific fork of bindgen (see the Cargo.toml for the repo and branch) and use that as the dependency.

Caveats

This is not an officially supported Google product.

License

^{Licensed under either of Apache License, Version 2.0 or MIT license at your option.}