Building a Safe, Idiomatic Rust Wrapper Around C
SpatialOS:
Some Background
A networking layer for multiplayer games:
- Persistence
- Scale
- Simulation
Provide direct support for popular game engines:
- Unity
- Unreal Engine 4
Supports multiple languages:
- C++
- C#
- Java
- C
- RUST??????
The Connection Object and Thread Safety
Is it Send?
Is it Sync?
To the forums!
... or wrapping it in a mutex.
It's safe to access from different threads, so long as only one thread accesses it at a time.
It doesn't use global variables
There's no shared state, methods mutate data within the struct in an unsynchronized way.
Speaking of OpList...
Playing With Pointers
What if we LIED?
- The data is completely opaque
- We never dereference the pointer
- All we care about is the value of the pointer
- Sometimes we own the data
- Sometimes can mutate the data
- Sometimes we can only read the data
Rust has conventions for this:
Box<T>&mut T&T