It’s been over a year since I first wrote about cbindgen. A lot has happened since then.

We’ve had a few new features added (tagged enums!), it’s seen some good use (25k all time downloads!), and there was a talk given at a rust berlin meetup!

This project started out as a quick fix for a problem we were facing at Mozilla. I thought others might find it useful so I open sourced it. It’s the first time I’ve ever ran an open source project, and I’ve learned a lot.

To this day, I’m continually surprised to see people using this tool and going through the effort to improve it. To everyone who’s helped out, thank you!

There is one issue I’d like to write about though.

Rust is a great language for doing tasks normally done in C/C++. While it has a minimal runtime and zero-cost abstractions, it also has guaranteed memory safety and high level language features that make programming easier.

Another neat thing about Rust is its ability to have a C FFI. Rust can be used to rewrite parts of an existing C/C++ application without having to rewrite the whole thing.

This means that you can get some of the benefits of Rust, without having to rewrite the whole world (which is often infeasible and tends to introduce new bugs).

After a short break from coding for school, I finally got enough free time to finish a project. One of my favorite puzzle games is game called Wordament. It’s a bit old now, but it still has an active community. The game is like Boggle, you get points for building a word across tiles.

To be honest, I’m not very good at it. So I thought, why not write a program to give me some answers? So I did. I know that there are other solvers out there, but I just thought it’d be fun to hack together.