vendredi, mai 17 2019

Rust+GNOME hackfest in Berlin

Last week I had the chance to attend for the first time the GNOME+Rust Hackfest in Berlin. My goal was to finish the GstVideoDecoder bindings, keep learning about Rust and meet people from the GNOME/Rust community. I had some experience with gstreamer-rs as an user but never actually wrote any bindings myself. To make it even more challenging the underlying C API is unfortunatelly unsafe so we had to do some smart tricks to make it safe to use in Rust.

I'm very happy with the work I managed to do during these 4 days. I was able to complete the bindings as well as my CDG decoder using them. The bindings are waiting for final review and the decoder should hopefully be merged soon as well. More importantly I learned a lot about the bindings infrastructure but also about more advanced Rust features and nice API design patterns. Turned out it's much easier to write Rust when you are sitting next to the gtk-rs maintainers. ;)

I'm very grateful to Guillaume and Sebastian for all the time they spent answering my questions and helping fighting the Rust compiler. Thanks also to Alban for letting me stay at his place, to Zeeshan and Kinvolk for organizing and hosting the hackfest and to Collabora for sponsoring my trip.

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