Hi, is there a somewhat easy way to call Rust code from Gleam? I've found this blog post: https://www.jonashietala.se/blog/2024/01/11/exploring_the_gleam_ffi/, but it describes a quite convoluted way to deal with the problem (passing through Erlang bindings to bridge the gap between Rust and Gleam).
#Wrap Rust code with Gleam?
bright juniper
cedar surge
Using natively implemented code has massive drawbacks so you should avoid it as much as possible
But if you really have no other option available to you (for example, to use SQLite) then you can use Erlang NIFs or the native binding features of whatever JavaScript runtime you are using
bright juniper
I understand. I was mostly curious in case there's some Rust crate I want to wrap for performance reasons.
cedar surge
What's the crate?
Native FFI has a performance overhead and can easily negatively impact the scheduler, so often it's slower than well written BEAM code
plucky lake
Is there somewhere I could read about this? What are the drawbacks, why they occur, etc.
I also read here somewhere that some languages are not a good target for Gleam, I think it was Go that was discussed -- does it have anything to do with it?
hardy cedar
Is there somewhere I could read about this? What are the drawbacks, why they occ...
the warning box there for example
(and further docs on that page)
cedar surge
Is there somewhere I could read about this? What are the drawbacks, why they occ...
No, the suitability of a language as a compilation target is unrelated to NIFs on the BEAM
plucky lake
https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/erts/erl_nif
Thanks, I will read
plucky lake
No, the suitability of a language as a compilation target is unrelated to NIFs o...
Where can I find out more about that?
cedar surge
About what, sorry?
plucky lake
What makes a language a suitable target
cedar surge
That's a very large subject
plucky lake
I tried searching for the go discussion here on discord but go is a very generic word
cedar surge
Implementation of programming languages is a whole area of computer science
For Go and functional languages specifically their memory allocator and GC is a bad fit
They want a small number of large allocations
FP is about a large number of small allocations
plucky lake
Interesting, thanks. That's surely enough to send me down a rabbit hole
bright juniper
What's the crate?
Ok so, to give you a bit of context. I'm learning Gleam right now and I really like it. It also seems very well suited for data analysis and manipulation. It's functional, thus data is immutable and transforming data is very easy, but it is also statically typed. This got me thinking about a dataframe library in Gleam, which I believe doesn't exist (or at least, I have not found it). So I thought that it would be cool to wrap polars from Rust with Gleam, because it is very performant already and I got the feeling the Gleam isn't suited for highly performant operations (which is fine, it doesn't need to be) but maybe I'm just wrong
cedar surge
Is this one suitable?
https://github.com/tynanbe/argamak