vincentlanderson / flatbuffers-rs

Runtime for flatbuffers in rust.

FlatBuffers in Rust

This library provides runtime support for FlatBuffers in Rust.

Obtaining the Modded FlatBuffers Compiler

I have created a modified version of the flatbuffers compiler which will produce Rust code as output. It is available in the rust-gen branch if my flatbuffers repository. It can compiled and installed via the following command sequence.

    # Clone the repository
    git clone https://github.com/arbitrary-cat/flatbuffers && cd flatbuffers

    # Checkout the branch with the rust code in it
    git checkout rust-gen

    # Prepare the makefiles with CMake
    cmake .

    # Build the project
    make

    # Install the binaries
    sudo make install

Then you can produce buffers.rs from buffers.fbs by running:

    flatc -r buffers.fbs

Usage

Once you've produced your *.rs files from the *.fbs files, move them to the appropriate location in your Rust program's source tree, and add the corresponding mod definitions (just like adding any other module to a Rust program).

The generated files expect you to have the num crate and my flatbuffers crate available. You can accomplish this by adding the following to your Cargo.toml

[dependencies]
num = "0.1.24"

[dependencies.flatbuffers]
git = "https://github.com/arbitrary-cat/flatbuffers-rs"

Then you need to add the correct crate imports to the top-level of your crate.

extern crate flatbuffers;
extern crate num;

Limitations

Right now the modded compiler is pretty sloppy, and it doesn't generate Verifiers like it does for the other languages. I'm working on this =].