electron-rust-quick-start

A minimal Electron + Rust example.

🌈 About

This repo is intended to offer an understandable example of calling into Rust from Electron.

If you plan to use this as a starting point for your project, definitely update the package.json and Cargo.toml with your information.

This template was created by synthesizing information from the following:

• Quick Start Guide, Electron
• Compiling from Rust to WebAssembly, Mozilla

✅ Prerequisites

• Rust (≥ 1.51.0) 🦀
• wasm-pack: cargo install wasm-pack
• Mandatory reading! 📚

⚡️ Getting started

Here's a one-liner:

git clone https://github.com/tylerdaddio/electron-rust-quick-start && cd electron-rust-quick-start && npm i && npm run wasm-build && npm start

And here's that one-linear broken into steps:

# Clone this repo
git clone https://github.com/tylerdaddio/electron-rust-quick-start

# Navigate into the folder
cd electron-rust-quick-start

# Download required npm packages listed in `package.json` (i.e. Electron & its dependencies)
npm install

# Build the sample `rust-lib` project into WebAssembly & JavaScript bindings. (See the full command in the `package.json`.)
npm run wasm-build

# Run the application. A window should open and an alert should appear.
npm start

✨ Tidbits

The Content-Security-Policy in the index.html is set to enable unsafe-eval. That seems unsafe. Why is that unsafe thing there?

Good question!

At time of writing, unsafe-eval is required in Chromium if you want to call into a WASM module. This shouldn't be required once wasm-eval is standardized, but only maybe (?).

As Electron is built on a web brower and has access to the full resources of your computer, it is severely unsafe by default. Before getting started, please perform the mandatory reading 📚.

🎓 Learn more

Here's some more stuff I've found helpful, inspiring, or both:

• From Electron, to WASM, to Rust (Aaand Back to Electron); Irina Shestak
• Rust: A language for the next 40 years; Carol Nichols
• The Rust Programming Language; Steve Klabnik & Carol Nichols
• Rust Community