@slomo@toot.catOver the last months the Rust/cargo support in meson improved a lot.
It's now ready to build and install a GTK4 Rust application with around 70 dependencies without having to write almost any custom build glue for the dependencies.
https://github.com/sdroege/mandelbrot#meson-build
The application in question is just a small experiment of mine for rayon and GTK4 input handling / rendering. The more or less same should work for other GTK4 applications at this point.
All this still depends on two unmerged meson PRs, but it's a huge step forward from the situation just a few months ago.
Thanks to the hard work of @xclaesse and dcbaker!
I hope in the future this will allow GNOME applications written in Rust to have a less strange and fragile build setup than what they have right now with mixing cargo and meson.
@slomoAlso my GStreamer plugin experiment from a couple of months ago works now without any custom build glue for the dependencies.
@slomo@zenmaya @xclaesse It calls rustc directly but has some degree of support for parsing Cargo.toml and running build.rs. This way you can use Rust dependencies nicely in a multi-language project, or in a project that consists of more than just an executable (e.g. data files), which is the only thing cargo really supports.
@slomo@krh @zenmaya @xclaesse For now it works if the build.rs has no dependencies, and it's all best-effort. Things relying on build.rs might or might not work. If they don't you can provide a meson.build snippet to extend the autogenerated one, see the two examples in subprojects/packagefiles in my repository.
Ideally most these things should be replaced by proper cargo features instead of hacks like build.rs, but I don't see that happening anytime soon so here we are applying more duct tape 