I’m a huge Rust enthusiast and you can read more about it in my previous article . Today, I’m gonna show you 2 examples of how Rust can be used together with some existing C and C++ codebases. Rust was designed with its FFI (Foreign Function Interface) in mind so it allows cheap (or even zero cost) interoperability with C and C++. For both solutions (plain C and C++), I’ll demonstrate that we can call C/C++ and Rust code back and forth (pass Rust callback to C++ code).

Usually, I’m skeptical about new technologies and programming languages. I take every novelty with a pinch of salt. Not because of the steep learning curve and lack of time but because I saw too many examples where promises were not delivered. The majority of the new technologies provided only minor improvements which were not really worth migration time. When I heard about Rust for the first time, my feelings were the same: if you need strongly typed high-performance native language without GC, why not just modern C++11 (or newer) instead of a new language?

On December 11, 1998, NASA launched the Mars Climate Orbiter - robotic space probe designed to explore Martian climate from orbit and also to act as a communications relay for polar lander sent 2 months later. Nobody expected that after 9 months journey it will crash in the atmosphere from such simple software mistake. Hard problems in NASA scale NASA puts a lot of effort into reliability. A lot of things can happen in space that we do not observe so often (or never) on Earth e.