GStreamer Now Able To Ship Rust-Written Plugins

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GStreamer Now Able To Ship Rust-Written Plugins

Along with the Linux kernel preparing for its initial Rust integration, Rusticl landing in Mesa this week as the first major Rust usage within Mesa, and Cloudflare announcing an Nginx HTTP proxy replacement written in Rust, some additional Rust adoption news for the week is that the GStreamer project is now ready to ship Rust-written plug-ins as part of their official binary releases...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/GStreamer-Ship-Rust-Plugins

[jacob]

I imagine this is based on the Rust GObject support?

[peterdk]

For GStreamer that makes indeed a lot of sense. Lots of input files that can be maliciously crafted to exploit things, and Rust here should make them a lot safer.

[archkde]

It's great to see Rust picking up more steam lately. This should be for the benefit of both the projects employing Rust, and also to Rust itself.

[rmnscnce]

I imagine this is based on the Rust GObject support?

Seems like so. There are still a lot of boilerplate required when working with GObject on Rust, but it's already "working as advertised".

[re:fi.64]

"reqwest" wasn't a typo, it's a Rust HTTP client, changing it to "request" makes no sense.

[coder]

For GStreamer that makes indeed a lot of sense. Lots of input files that can be maliciously crafted to exploit things, and Rust here should make them a lot safer.

I doubt any of the existing parsers will be rewritten in Rust. Furthermore, GStreamer doesn't even write its own decoders & encoders -- they're just wrappers around libav, x265, etc.

I've been developing GStreamer plugins and applications for more than a decade, and it seems to me there are two potential big wins, here.

1. Eliminate the risks & chores of manual ref-counting.
2. Avoid lots of the boilerplate code, when implementing new pipeline elements.

[kpedersen]

I doubt any of the existing parsers will be rewritten in Rust. Furthermore, GStreamer doesn't even write its own decoders & encoders

Perhaps they will make a new category. Good, bad, ugly, rusty.

[uid313]

This is great!
I hope all GStreamer plugins will be rewritten in Rust!
I would also like to see the same for FFmpeg, and for PDF.

[coder]

I hope all GStreamer plugins will be rewritten in Rust!

That's not realistic. Maybe a few "bad" elements will be, but I think this is mostly aimed at supporting new elements rather than rewriting existing ones.

That said, if someone is willing to fund the work, I think some selective rewrites could certainly happen.

I would also like to see the same for FFmpeg, and for PDF.

I don't see any indication that ffmpeg is embracing Rust. All I see are wrappers for using ffmpeg from Rust.

And, uh, PDF is a format.