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.

Due to the memory safety around Rust, media encoders/decoders written in Rust has always been an area that has made a lot of sense and the GStreamer developers have been interested in using this modern programming language.

This merge request for GStreamer has now landed for supporting the building of Cargo-C recipes for native builds. This is needed for shipping Rust-written plugins as part of the official binary releases for the project. This support is currently in place for GStreamer builds on Linux, macOS, and Windows with MSVC while the Android and iOS integration should be ready for the GStreamer N+1 release..

Following a whole month of really annoying build system work, we can finally ship @gstreamer plugins that are written in @rustlang with our official binary releases: https://t.co/Qjk8Tv8sNV

— निर्भीक चौहान (@nirbheek) September 15, 2022

GStreamer developer Nirbheek Chauhan went on to add, "This is really exciting because now people will have easy access to excellent plugins such as HTTP elements based on reqwest, WebRTC WHIP sink, dav1d decoder, rav1e encoder, RaptorQ FEC implementation, AWS plugin, fallbackswitch plugin (to easily switch between sources) and more!"