It’s been a week since I announced Rust Qt Binding Generator.

Rust Qt Binding Generator (Logo by Alessandro Longo)

Since last week

A brief recap. The new project Rust Qt Binding Generator can create bindings between Rust code and Qt code. You can use Rust code to power your Qt application. Or in other words, you can use Qt as a cross-platform user interface for your Rust application.

You describe the interface between Rust and Qt in a simple JSON file. Then you compile the Rust code into a static library that you call from Qt. The user interface is still written in QML or C++. QML in particular is a wonderful language for writing user interfaces. And with these bindings, your Rust code will feel as a natural part of that user interface.

Today, I’ll walk through a very simple application. We’ll pretend that Qt code has no way to figure out the time, so we’ll implement code in Rust to ask the time.

But first an update on the happenings since the announcement of the bindings.

Live at KDE

The project is hosted at KDE. This is important to me. KDE is a community where software is created that gives the user control. It is a smoothly running organization that churns out releases of libraries and applications regularly.

Since this week the project is set up on the KDE infrastructure thanks to our admin team. That means bugzilla for bug reports, Phabricator for code browsing and patch review and Jenkins for continuous integration including code coverage.

The first translation commits and bot housekeeping commits have appeared already.

If you want to contribute, please create an account at the KDE community.

Time for QML

If you are new to QML, I can recommend the QML book. It walks you through many wonderful examples. In addition, Qt Creator comes with many more.

It is a tradition in KDE to use clocks as examples. I will follow this tradition and create a widget that shows the time.

We’ll start without any Rust at all. The initial version is only QML. It uses a simple SVG image as the background.

You can download this version and run it locally with qmlscene . qmlscene can run plain QML files. If you have QML plugins installed, these can be used too. You can make plugins that are implemented in Rust, but we’ll not go into that now.

The syntax of QML is declarative. The rotation of the Rust logo is given by the statement angle: time.second * 6 . This is a binding. The value of angle updates automatically whenever time.second changes. The rotation of the logo changes every second because of this declarative binding.

Another example is anchors.fill: parent on the Image item. This means that the image takes up the same rectangular space as the parent item. If that item is resized, the image will scale along with it.

In this file, we added a temporary QtObject with properties hour , minute and second . The values in this object are updated every second by the Timer item. The JavaScript code between {} runs every second and updates the values in the QtObject . This object has id: time and the logo and hands are bound to this object.

The QtObject is a functional placeholder for the Rust code that we are going to write later.

import QtQuick 2.5 import QtQuick.Window 2.2 Window { width: 512 height: 512 visible: true // A mock-up of the time object that we will // implement in Rust QtObject { id: time property int hour property int minute property int second } // This timer will also become Rust code Timer { interval: 1000; running: true; repeat: true onTriggered: { var date = new Date() time.hour = date.getHours() time.minute = date.getMinutes() time.second = date.getSeconds() } } // the clock face Image { anchors.fill: parent source: "rust-logo-blk.svg" fillMode: Image.PreserveAspectFit transform: Rotation { origin.x: width / 2 origin.y: height / 2 angle: time.second * 6 // convert seconds to degrees } } // the minute hand Rectangle { id: minute x: (parent.width - width) / 2 y: 0 width: parent.width / 100 height: parent.height / 1.8 radius: width color: "#3daefd" transform: Rotation { origin.x: hour.width / 2 origin.y: height / 2 // convert minutes to degrees angle: time.minute * 6 } } // the hour hand Rectangle { id: hour x: (parent.width - width) / 2 y: parent.height / 6 width: parent.width / 50 height: parent.height / 2.8 radius: width color: "#3daefd" transform: Rotation { origin.x: hour.width / 2 origin.y: height / 3 // convert hours to degrees angle: time.hour * 30 + time.minute / 2 } } }

Time for Rust and QML

Set up a QML project with Rust

Before we can replace the QtObject , we have to set up a project. Rust Qt Binding Generator comes with a template project for QML in the folder templates/qt_quick .

You can get set up like so. You will need to have Qt, Rust and CMake installed.

First build rust_qt_binding_generator .

Now build and run the template project.

You will be greeted with a ‘Hello World’ application.

Starting from a template

So what just happened? The template project is based on CMake. CMake is the build system that most KDE projects use. A template in CMake is an example of how to add Rust code to KDE programs. It is possible to use another build system.

CMake performs four steps. It

generates Rust and C++ from bindings.json by calling rust_qt_binding_generator, compiles the Rust code in rust/ into a static library by calling cargo, compiles the C++ code, links the C++ objects, the QML files, and the Rust library into an executable.

If you prefer to use only cargo , you’ll have to tell it to perform steps 1, 3 and 4 in a build.rs file.

Adding some Rust

Now let’s turn this clock into the Antikythera mechanism by adding some Rust.

We want the Rust code to have a Time object that indicates the hour, the minute and the second. We write this interface into bindings.json .

Now if we run make again, three files will be updated: src/Bindings.h , src/Bindings.cpp , and rust/src/interface.rs . And then we’ll get a compile error from cargo .

That is because we have to adapt rust/src/implementation.rs to the new interface.rs . interface.rs specifies a trait that must be implemented in implementation.rs .

This is the generated trait:

Note that the trait has getters, but no setters. With "write": true , you can add setters on properties.

For now, we implement a fixed time in our new implementation.rs .

Now whenever the QML application wants to know the time, it can ask the Rust code. Well, almost. We have to change three more files and one of them is a C++ file. It is a very simple change and it is needed to tell the QML code about the Rust QObject. In src/main.cpp , change this line:

to this

And we have to add the logo to the qml.qrc . This file lists files that should be compiled into the executable.

Now write this in main.qml . The third line imports our Rust object into the application. Our mockup QtObject and the Timer have been replaced with Time { id: time } .

This Time still has the properties hour , minute , and second . Whenever these change, the user interface is updated.

import QtQuick 2.5 import QtQuick.Window 2.2 import RustCode 1.0 Window { width: 512 height: 512 visible: true // here is our Rust time Time { id: time } // the clock face Image { anchors.fill: parent source: "rust-logo-blk.svg" fillMode: Image.PreserveAspectFit transform: Rotation { origin.x: width / 2 origin.y: height / 2 angle: time.second * 6 // convert seconds to degrees } } // the minute hand Rectangle { id: minute x: (parent.width - width) / 2 y: 0 width: parent.width / 100 height: parent.height / 1.8 radius: width color: "#3daefd" transform: Rotation { origin.x: hour.width / 2 origin.y: height / 2 // convert minutes to degrees angle: time.minute * 6 } } // the hour hand Rectangle { id: hour x: (parent.width - width) / 2 y: parent.height / 6 width: parent.width / 50 height: parent.height / 2.8 radius: width color: "#3daefd" transform: Rotation { origin.x: hour.width / 2 origin.y: height / 3 // convert hours to degrees angle: time.hour * 30 + time.minute / 2 } } }

Start the time

A happy clock

Are you still here? That was quite a few instructions to follow for a simple example. The good news is that this setup does not get harder when you add more interfaces.

Anyway, now the part you’ve been waiting for. We will let Rust update the time and send it to the user interface. The crate chrono is used to get the time. Add it to lib.rs and Cargo.toml .

This code goes in implementation.rs . A thread wakes up every second and sends a signal to the user interface whenever a property changes.

Closing remarks

This was a pretty long tutorial with quite a few different parts. That was the point of the tutorial: to learn the parts that make up a binding between Qt and Rust.