rust_in_flutter 1.0.0

Easily use Rust to make your Flutter app blazingly fast!

🆎 About

Easily use Rust to make your Flutter app blazingly fast!

This high-level wrapper package simplifies Rust integration for your Flutter app without the need for code generation or native tooling. Designed with ease of use, future scalability, and exceptional performance in mind, it handles all the complicated aspects behind the scenes. Simply add this package to your Flutter project and you're ready to write Rust!

Benefits

• Rust integration with the ability to use an arbitrary number of library crates
• RESTful API with easy request from Dart and response from Rust
• Async interaction with no blocking
• Streaming from Rust to Dart
• Restarting Rust logic on Dart's hot restart
• No memory copy when sending data
• No complicated code generation during development

Platform Support

With this package, you don't have to start from scratch or face the challenging complexity of integrating Rust.

• ✅ Linux: Tested and supported
• ✅ Android: Tested and supported
• ✅ Windows: Tested and supported
• ✅ macOS: Tested and supported
• ✅ iOS: Tested and supported
• ⏸️ Web: Not now but considered

If you have any suggestions or want to report a bug, please leave it as an issue or a pull request. We will try to respond as quickly as possible.

👜 Installing

First, add this package to your Flutter project.

flutter pub add rust_in_flutter

Rust Toolchain

Refer to the Rust docs to install Rust toolchain on your system. Because you're going to write Rust, only having the Flutter SDK on your system is not enough.

Extra Steps

If you are planning to compile your code for Linux, Windows, macOS, or iOS, you don't have to do anything more.

For Android, install Android NDK. You must select the exact expected NDK version from your Flutter project, which can be seen in your ./android/app/build.gradle file or here.

Using extra build targets with Rust can sometimes present various issues. If you encounter any problems, feel free to visit the discussions page and open a Q&A thread for assistance.

👜 Applying Rust

Simply run this in the command-line. Make sure that the current directory of the terminal is your Flutter project folder.

dart run rust_in_flutter:apply_rust

Once you've run the command, there will be some new folders and files that will be your Rust code's starting point.

    my_flutter_project/
    ├── android/
    ├── ios/
    ├── lib/
    ├── linux/
+   ├── native/
+   │   ├── hub/
+   │   ├── sample_crate/
+   │   └── README.md
    ├── test/
    ├── web/
    ├── windows/
+   ├── Cargo.toml
    ├── pubspec.yaml
    └── ...

Entry point of your Rust logic is the hub library crate. You might want to remove sample_crate in production.

Please keep in mind:

• Do NOT change the name of the hub crate or the native folder. Compilation presets expect an entry library crate to be located at ./native/hub.
• Do NOT modify the bridge module inside ./native/hub/src.
• You CAN name crates other than hub as you want.

Now by heading over to ./native/hub/src/lib.rs, you can start writing Rust!

🧱 Tips

Ideally, Flutter would deal with the cross-platform user interface while Rust handles the business logic. The front-end and back-end can be completely separated, meaning that Dart and Rust codes are detachable from each other. These two worlds communicate through channels and streams.

Use MessagePack for serializing messages sent between Dart and Rust as provided by the template, unless you have other reasons not to do so. For those who aren't familiar, MessagePack is a nested binary structure similar to JSON, but much faster and more efficient.

Data being sent between Dart and Rust are basically bytes arrays, represented as Uint8List in Dart and Vec<u8> in Rust. Though using MessagePack serialization is recommended, you can send any kind of bytes data as you wish, such as a high-resolution image or some kind of file data.

☕ Support Us

😉 If you are benefiting from the features of Rust-In-Flutter and find it helpful, why not consider supporting this project? Your generous donations contribute to the maintenance and development of Rust-in-Flutter, ensuring its continuous improvement and growth.

If you feel like so, please consider buying us a coffee.

🌋 Pioneers

This project was not done alone. There were various helpful projects that gave inspiration to the structure of this package. Credits to these wonderful efforts!

• https://github.com/fzyzcjy/flutter_rust_bridge
• https://github.com/superlistapp/super_native_extensions
• https://github.com/brickpop/flutter-rust-ffi
• https://github.com/corrosion-rs/corrosion
• https://github.com/irondash/cargokit