Ruby FFI with Rust

We can use Ruby FFI to interface with other programming languages. This talk shares why we should consider Rust, and how we can use Ruby FFI to leverage Rust's high performance.

Transcript

1. Ruby FFI with Rust
2. About me • Software engineer • Previously from Engine Yard (~ 5 years) • About to join the team at TradeGecko • A non-prolific open source contributor for Ruby and Rust projects • Co-created Mina deployment tool
3. Outline • What is FFI? • Why Rust? • How to Ruby FFI?
4. FFI Foreign Function Interface A Foreign Function Interface (FFI) is a means for a programming language to interface with libraries written in other programming languages. Source: From Chapter 3 of The ECL Manual by Garcia-Ripoll, Kochmański
5. Why Rust?
6. Why Rust? • Performance • Reliability • Productivity
7. Performance Rust is blazingly fast and memory-efficient: with no runtime or garbage collector, it can power performance-critical services, run on embedded devices, and easily integrate with other languages. Source: www.rust-lang.org
8. An old performance comparison for a “hello world” HTTP server Source: https://aturon.github.io/blog/2016/08/11/futures/
9. Porting Node.js API to Rust Source: https://twitter.com/rossipedia/status/1101266107178967040
10. Rust is well-known for performance and security.
11. Rust is the most-loved* language in Stack Overflow developer survey for 4 years in a row. * not most popular
12. Productivity
13. Documentation
14. “the Rust book”
15. Cargo
16. Compiler
17. Rust is as powerful as C++ but feels like a high-level language.
18. Iterating a HashMap in Rust use std::collections::HashMap; let mut scores = HashMap::new(); scores.insert("Blue".to_string(), 10); scores.insert("Yellow".to_string(), 50); for (key, value) in &scores { println!("{}: {}", key, value); }
20. Compiler
21. Question: When to use Rust?
22. When to use Rust? • CLI tools • Network services • WASM • Embedded systems • Asynchronous applications • Game development
23. When to use Rust? For Ruby web developers • CLI tools • Network services • Server agents • Background jobs • Speeding up slow parts of our application using FFI
24. Ruby FFI
25. Ruby FFI: Requirements 1. C compiler 2. libffi library and development headers 3. ffi gem
26. 1. C compiler
27. Xcode on macOS
28. gcc or clang elsewhere
29. 2. libffi library
30. $ brew install libffi
31. https://github.com/libffi/libffi
32. 3. ffi gem
33. $ gem install ffi
34. Rust library
35. Rust function fn add(a: u32, b: u32) -> u32 { a + b }
36. Rust function #[no_mangle] pub extern fn add(a: u32, b: u32) -> u32 { a + b }
37. Using FFI in Ruby require 'ffi' module Main extend FFI::Library ffi_lib 'target/debug/librubyffi.' + FFI::Platform::LIBSUFFIX attach_function :add, [:int, :int], :int end
38. Using FFI in Ruby LIBSUFFIX = case OS when /darwin/ 'dylib' when /linux|bsd|solaris/ 'so' when /windows|cygwin|msys/ 'dll' else # Punt and just assume a sane unix (i.e. anything but AIX) 'so' end
39. Using FFI in Ruby require 'ffi' module Main extend FFI::Library ffi_lib 'target/debug/librubyffi.' + FFI::Platform::LIBSUFFIX attach_function :add, [:int, :int], :int end sum = Main.add(2, 2)
40. @mikong
41. Thank you!