[Announcement] Rust bindings to libnautilus-extension

[Andrew Shu <talklittle gmail com>]

Hi Nautilus developers,

I have created a Rust (programming language) crate with bindings to libnautilus-extension:

https://github.com/talklittle/nautilus-extension-rs

https://crates.io/crates/nautilus-extension

The goal is to let people write Nautilus extensions in Rust, where you get a lot of safety advantages, especially with memory allocation protection. It should typically require fewer lines of code compared to an equivalent C extension. It also seems quite a bit faster than the Python bindings.

So far there is 1 extension consuming the Rust bindings: https://github.com/talklittle/tmsu-nautilus-rs

It is a work in progress. About half of the libnautilus-extension APIs are currently supported. It was enough to get the first version of the "TMSU Nautilus" extension working.

The current downside is that the compiled extension shared libraries are very large (a few megabytes), since they must bundle a lot of Rust libraries, which are not yet commonly distributed in Linux OS distros.

Thanks for reading,

Andrew