[vlc-devel] Rust work (discussion)

[Romain Vimont]

Hi Lyndon,

On Sun, Sep 20, 2020 at 04:25:13AM +0100, Lyndon Brown wrote:
> Specifically, a years-old project to achieve a complete conversion of
> the whole VLC codebase (to Rust).

That's impressive, but if the goal is to rewrite every single line of
VLC in Rust "at once", why not writing an alternate Rust media player
project (possibly inspired by VLC architecture) instead?

This would remove a lot of constraints.

In particular, the design of an API is heavily impacted by the language
in which it is written. Designing it in Rust from the beginning would
probably result in a better Rust API.

And a synchronized "switchover" would become unnecessary: if the project
gets enough traction, people interested would join.

That's what happened for other projects. For example, rg is a grep-like
tool written in Rust, the author was not constrained by the grep design,
did not require validation and synchronization from grep authors, and no
"switchover" was needed. And many people use it (including me).

Regards