Comparison with other projects¶

Gobley¶

Gobley and this project try to achieve much the same thing: Kotlin Multiplatform bindings for Rust libraries with UniFFI, built by a Gradle plugin. Both started as forks of Trixnity's bindings, and have gone in different directions since. Gobley kept the structure of the original project. This project rewrote the Gradle plugin, and keeps the bindgen up to date with Mozilla's UniFFI.

Multi-module support¶

The main difference is that this project supports multi-module projects: every crate gets its own Gradle module and its own library, and any number of modules can use the types of a shared module. Shared types are the same Kotlin classes everywhere and pass between modules without conversion. This is possible because all code that doesn't depend on a crate, including the allocation of RustBuffers, lives in a shared runtime.

Gobley only supports external types. Each generated package has its own copy of the helper code and is bound to one library. To use a shared crate's types from another module, the shared module doesn't ship its own library (embedRustLibrary = false), and its bindings are pointed at the dependent library instead. That covers one crate using another, but not several modules depending on the same shared module.

Versions¶

This project currently supports newer versions: UniFFI 0.32.0 (Gobley: 0.29) and AGP 9 with the Android Kotlin Multiplatform library plugin (Gobley: AGP 8).

Targets¶

Gobley supports more targets: tvOS, watchOS, Android Native, macOS x64 and Windows MSVC for the JVM, and it generates stubs for JS and Wasm. See Targets for the targets this project supports. Other targets can be added as well. If you need one, please open an issue.

Which one to use¶

Use Gobley if you need compatibility with the original Trixnity setup. Otherwise, and in particular if you want to split your Rust code into several modules, use this project.