Integrate with rust/cargo/crates.io

[marcesquerra]

I wonder how much effort would it take to make elba allow the use rust dependencies (both from a folder or from crates.io)

The use case a) This would immediately boost the capabilities of idris, giving it a ton of good quality libraries ready to use b) For performance critical or low level development rust is a perfect language with ideals regarding compile-time safety that are really compatible with the idris philosophy.

The approach Instead of trying to add everything cargo can do into elba (that would be a lot of work), what about requiring cargo and llc to be already installed in the system as a dependency and then invoke cargo as an external program from within elba. I've got my reference on how to call rust stuff from idris from here

What do you think?

I haven't taken a look at the elba codebase yet, but I would love to help with this, if you think it's worthwhile...

[andylokandy]

I think it's far beyond what elba can do. Intergrating the rust ecosystem and Idris' sounds a great idea, but it's not for free, because you have to write the wrapper, redesign/reexpose the api and stuff.

One way to do that, with writing the binding code, is to use the prebuild script hook to execute cargo in advance.