Creating native extensions in Rust for Node.js

There are times when the performance of JavaScript in the Node.js runtime is not enough, so developers reach out to other low-level languages to create native Node.js modules. Often, C and C++ are used as the implementation language for these native modules. Rust can also be used to create native Node.js modules via the the same FFI abstractions that we saw for C and Python. In this section, we'll explore a high-level wrapper for these FFI abstractions, called the neon project, which was created by Dave Herman from Mozilla.

The neon project is a set of tools and glue code that makes the life of Node.js developers easier, allowing them to write native Node.js modules in Rust and consume them seamlessly in their JavaScript code. The project resides at https://github.com/neon-bindings/neon. It's partially written in JavaScript: there's a command-line tool called neon in the neon-cli package, a JavaScript-side support library, and a Rust-side support...