[vlc-devel] Rust work (discussion)

[Thomas Guillem]

Hello Lyndon,

First, thanks a lot for your contributions to the ML recently.

I do really think than porting VLC from C to Rust need to be done incrementally.

Here is a plan I suggest:

1/ We enable Rust contribs supports.
2/ We write proper Rust API that will be used by Rust modules to interact with VLC Core (actually WIP by Kartik, Johan and Romain).
3/ We add new and optional Rust modules
4/ We add new mandatory Rust modules
5/ We start rewriting some C modules (MKV, MP4 in priority as said by Rémi)
6/ We add Rust support in the CORE.
7/ We start writing some CORE functionalities in Rust.

The first 3 steps will likely be ready for VLC 4.0. We need to discuss it, but we can imagine that Rust is not enabled by default in VLC 4.0, or enabled by default but not mandatory.

When we hit the next 2 steps (4/ and 5/), we enable Rust everywhere on all VLC ports/arch (so, windows-arm and tvos that are not disabled).

The last steps (6/ and 7/) are a bonus for me. We don't have many security issues on the CORE part of VLC, and it's not as important as rewriting our demuxers in Rust.

Lyndon, we would love to have your help on all these steps.

Best regards,
Thomas Guillem

On Tue, Sep 22, 2020, at 10:27, Romain Vimont wrote:
> 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
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