FFI Implementations from the buttplug-rs Rust Sex Toy Control Library to other langauges.

If you don't work in Rust but still want to control sex toys, you're in the right place!

The Buttplug Rust FFI library exposes access to the Buttplug Client API of buttplug-rs. This allows creation of both in-process (i.e. run both a Buttplug client/server in the same process, including direct hardware access) and remote (i.e. use Buttplug Client to talk via Websockets/Pipes/etc to a remote Buttplug server) Buttplug Clients. From these clients, you can scan for and get back device objects, which allow for control of devices from the language of your choice.

To be honest, the API surface of Buttplug is fairly small. The bulk of the library consists of internal configuration, protocol translation, and hardware communication. If the FFI layer seems small, that's because it is. There really aren't that many entry points into the library itself, which luckily makes building FFI easy.

For simple type conversion purposes, the FFI layer uses flatbuffers. Flatbuffers provide a simple, fast way to deal with type differences between many languages, and due to the low frequency of message updates in buttplug (we might send 100s of messages per second in a system with multiple devices, but usually its 10s), the overhead of the conversion process isn't too expensive for us.

For more information on FFI and Rust using intermediate serialization layers, check out the following articles:

• Rust @ Fullstory Part 2
• Rust @ Fullstory Part 2
• Crossing the Rust FFI Frontier with Protocol Buffers

The actual FFI layer consists of a few exposed cdecl functions (see the export.rs file for method definitions) that serve as message passing interfaces in and out of the system. These functions should handle being called from different threads.

The library currently implements FFI from Rust to the following languages:

• C#

Our current plans are to expand to the following list of languages:

• JS/Typescript (both Node and Web/WASM)
• Python
• C/C++
• Swift
• Java
• Go
• Haskell

If you have any languages you would like to see supported, please file an issue and let us know.

If you would like to help provide language implementations for buttplug-rs-ffi, please comment on the related issue in our tracker.

buttplug-rs-ffi is BSD licensed.

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