Project Orbiter addon development in Rust

[thomasantony]

I am not sure if there are any Rust language fans here. I took a stab at creating a minimal Rust bindings layer for the Orbiter SDK to allow development of addons in Rust. You can find the repository here: https://github.com/thomasantony/orbiter-rs .

The repo includes a simple "Surveyor" probe addon written in Rust (based on the OrbiterWiki tutorial). The README should give you some more details. I also have a short blog post about this. Hopefully someone finds this useful!

 

[jedidia]

I never tried Rust because I currently just have nothing to use it on, but I've heard a great many good things about it. Having a less cumbersome language than C++ to write orbiter add-ons... yeah, that would be a great thing (don't think immutability would see much use in this environment, though, but easy-to-use lambdas would be very welcome).

However, the orbiter API is pretty large, and in my experience binding libraries are very expensive to maintain. Even if we had complete bindings, I would doubt their longevity, making me somewhat hesitant to use them for any serious project. As such, the effort might not be worth it...

 

[Lucy]

I am not sure if there are any Rust language fans here. I took a stab at creating a minimal Rust bindings layer for the Orbiter SDK to allow development of addons in Rust. You can find the repository here: https://github.com/thomasantony/orbiter-rs .

The repo includes a simple "Surveyor" probe addon written in Rust (based on the OrbiterWiki tutorial). The README should give you some more details. I also have a short blog post about this. Hopefully someone finds this useful!

I love this. I really like rust, and I really like Orbiter, so this combination of things is great! I just normally do my rust development under linux, which is somewhat more difficult for Orbiter stuff.

 

[thomasantony]

I love this. I really like rust, and I really like Orbiter, so this combination of things is great! I just normally do my rust development under linux, which is somewhat more difficult for Orbiter stuff.

One of the biggest draws for me with this setup is that I don't have to use the Visual Studio IDE. I can code in VSCode and just run "cargo build". Running it under "Git Bash" keeps it close to a unix experience. Maybe its possible to do that with C++ as well (i.e. VS code+terminal) but I am not sure how to.

However, the orbiter API is pretty large, and in my experience binding libraries are very expensive to maintain. Even if we had complete bindings, I would doubt their longevity, making me somewhat hesitant to use them for any serious project. As such, the effort might not be worth it...

I agree. I want to use this to play with some autopilot code. And it turns out that I didn't Google this before I started. I found an older project that seems to cover more of the SDK: https://github.com/emgre/orbiter-rs . I am not sure how complete it is today, but it has some other stuff implemented that I don't. I want to get mine to something like that repo, with some more macros to improve usability.

 

[jedidia]

I found an older project that seems to cover more of the SDK: https://github.com/emgre/orbiter-rs .

Huh, I never even heard of that...