DevLog.md

Decision log

2023-01-19

Passing complex types as Strings through Uniffi bridging

At the moment of writing, Uniffi didn't support passing complex types through Uniffi bridge.
(See related issue #1, #2 and type mapping table from docs).

There were some attempts to implement passing any non-primitive type by the means of JSON serialization & deserialization.
See related PR. But it wasn't merged due to the reasons outlined in the comments.

To work around this limitation – manual JSON serialization & deserialization happens when passing complex types back and forth between Rust and Swift code. This process leverages lib0-serde feature.

Few further improvements that can be made here:

• Use lib0 binary encoding/decoding to pass data as binary buffers rather than JSON strings.
• Pass raw pointers (e.g. BranchPtr from yrs) through the bridge and consume them using Unmanaged features of Swift.

2023-01-10

Monorepo for Kotlin & Swift bindings development

Both Kotlin and Swift bindings need to access common .udl (interface definition file), few options as git submodules were considered, but decision was made to go with monorepo setup for the active development phase of the bindings as it was the simplest-to-use and lowest overhead approach.

After language bindings reach their stable release states, we might consider to split the repo into three parts: Uniffi, Kotlin and Swift, where Uniffi part will contain .udl file and wrapping Rust library that will eventually publish corresponding artifacts (e.g. SPM package for Swift and Gradle module for Kotlin)

2022-12-20

Uniffi as bindgen foundation

UniFFI was chosen as binding generation solution for Kotlin & Swift language bindings due to good documentation, active maintenance state and overall use case suitability.

Alternatives considered: swift-bridge and Yrs C FFI