Up until this point in the book, we've discussed Rust more or less in isolation. Rust was intentionally designed to integrate with other programming languages by calling external programming languages through its Foreign Function Interface (FFI) and by being embedded itself. Many modern programming languages offer FFI, easy embedding, or both. Python, for instance, can very conveniently call out to libraries with C calling conventions and can be embedded with a little forethought. Lua, a high-level and garbage-collected language like Python, has a convenient FFI and can be embedded without much trouble. Erlang has a small handful of FFI interfaces but Erlang is not, itself, easily embedded into user-space environments. Amusingly, it's fairly straightforward to compile Erlang into an RTOS image.
In this chapter...
