Ice with Rust

[dgehriger]

Hi,

I'm considering using ice for our mixed C++ / Rust environment. While there is a crate supporting Rust (ice-rs), it has gone stale three years ago. Also, it's GPL. On the other hands, I'm seeing signs of Rust support being implemented by the zeroc-ice project. Would you mind telling me what the current status is, and if it is already possible to use ZeroC-Ice from Rust?

[bernardnormier]

Hi Daniel,

We very much welcome independent efforts to bring Ice to more programming languages. ice-rs was such an effort, but unfortunately it looks like it went stale a few years ago.

I am not aware of any other "Ice for Rust" project. We don't plan to add support for Rust in Ice--there are portions of the Slice language (in Ice) that don't map well to Rust, namely classes and exceptions.

On the other hand, we very much plan to implement IceRPC in Rust. That's the next language we'll support in IceRPC. And we were careful to design "new Slice" to work well with Rust. We even wrote the new Slice compiler (slicec) in Rust.

IceRPC for Rust is not public yet. I hope we can release it in the coming months, but there is no set timeframe at this point.

[InsertCreativityHere]

Just to expand and clarify here,
IceRPC and Ice are both developed by us, and so have a high degree of interop.
Once we release Rust support with IceRPC, it would be very possible to use your existing Ice C++ code alongside IceRPC Rust code!

[dgehriger]

Thank you very much for your complete and fast response! I'll keep your project on my radar then. I'm currently writing a few benchmarks that nicely represent my specific use cases, and I may well try to port them to Ice to get some hard data. Thanks again.