Doing an incremental rewrite from C/C++ to Rust, we had to use a lot of raw pointers and unsafe{} blocks. And even when segregating these to the entry point of the library, they proved to be a big pain in the neck.
That's how the project ended up in such a bad state by the end. Instead of having rust-rust linkages that the compiler could check, they designed every function boundary to be an uncheckable rust-* linkage. This would be like porting a C library to C++, but only moving one function at a time, such that every single function had to comply with extern C.
Here is an important warning:
The difficulty of setting up boundaries to unsafe languages are the hidden reason for people wanting to rewrite every C library in Rust. Do not choose a design pattern that requires more than one of these boundaries to exist within your own code!
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That's how the project ended up in such a bad state by the end. Instead of having rust-rust linkages that the compiler could check, they designed every function boundary to be an uncheckable rust-* linkage. This would be like porting a C library to C++, but only moving one function at a time, such that every single function had to comply with extern C.
Here is an important warning:
The difficulty of setting up boundaries to unsafe languages are the hidden reason for people wanting to rewrite every C library in Rust. Do not choose a design pattern that requires more than one of these boundaries to exist within your own code!