rust-panama

A template project for setting up both Rust and the Java 18 Panama Foreign Linker API (via jextract).

How to Setup

• Clone the repo.
• Modify the values in gradle.properties to your liking.
• You're done!

Why Rust?

Rust has limited support in the Java ecosystem, and as such, deserves to have some attention (especially since it's a very nice and fast language). Due to the difficulty of interfacing with a native application like Cargo, the template uses a Gradle plugin called gradle-cargo-wrapper that runs Cargo via Gradle's Exec task type.

Read more about Rust:

• rust-lang.org
• The Book

What's Panama?

Project Panama (shortened to just Panama) is an upcoming collection of Java features designed to enhance performance safely.
Currently, Panama includes 3 major APIs:

• Memory Access (JEP-383)
• Foreign Linker (FFI/Foreign Function Interface) (JEP-389)
• Vector (JEP-338)

These all work with low-level concepts, like memory, and are very efficient.
The main API we are looking at for this template is the Foreign Linker, as it allows for a high-speed alternative to JNI (Java Native Interface), which is what allows us to interface with functions in native languages, like C or Rust.

The Foreign Linker is quite complicated by itself, but thankfully a tool was created to automatically generate the required bindings for a C header file. This tool is called jextract and is used by this template.

Special Thanks

• @krakowski - gradle-jextract
• @Arc-blroth - gradle-cargo-wrapper