
Building an iOS App in Rust - weinzierl
https://www.bignerdranch.com/blog/building-an-ios-app-in-rust-part-1/
======
santaclaus
What is the advantage of using Rust for an iOS app over Swift, especially now
that Swift is open source? I doubt the overheard of reference counting is
going to be an issue for most iOS apps (although I'd be super interested to
hear where it might).

~~~
danielvf
The idea is to use it for cross platform libraries. Let's say you were
building an RSS reader, you could reuse your same feed parsing code on
Android, Windows, Mac, and Linux.

~~~
santaclaus
But with Swift riding on top of the LLVM infrastructure similar to Rust, cross
platform libraries are also possible with the Swift toolchain, no?

~~~
theresistor
Nothing about LLVM makes Swift inherently cross-platform. LLVM bitcode is not
target independent.

~~~
Alphasite_
I'm not sure I understand the relevance? Neither are rust libraries.

------
kibwen
Note that this is from 2015, the recent push to improve Rust's cross-
compilation story may have made the info within obsolete.

~~~
weinzierl
> Note that this is from 2015

That's true. The submission is only the first part of a series that spans
several months. I pasted the links below for convenience[1]. The last part (so
far) is from April 14, 2016.

> he recent push to improve Rust's cross-compilation story may have made the
> info within obsolete.

Now that we have rustup [2], what is described in the first part should be
much easier. I find it still worthwhile because it helps to understand what
rustup does for you automatically. Researching this topic is actually how I
found the article.

[1]

[https://www.bignerdranch.com/blog/building-an-ios-app-in-
rus...](https://www.bignerdranch.com/blog/building-an-ios-app-in-rust-part-1/)

[https://www.bignerdranch.com/blog/building-an-ios-app-in-
rus...](https://www.bignerdranch.com/blog/building-an-ios-app-in-rust-part-2/)

[https://www.bignerdranch.com/blog/building-an-ios-app-in-
rus...](https://www.bignerdranch.com/blog/building-an-ios-app-in-rust-part-3/)

[https://www.bignerdranch.com/blog/building-an-ios-app-in-
rus...](https://www.bignerdranch.com/blog/building-an-ios-app-in-rust-part-4/)

[2] [https://www.rustup.rs/](https://www.rustup.rs/)

