Rust SDK generation

[liamwh]

Hi guys,

I see here a bunch of clients that are auto generated. I'm a huge rust fan and would love to be able to consume a Rust version of your SDK. Given the recent rust explosion, especially in the Cloud Native community, I feel it would be excellent for Aserto to support Rust moving forwards. How do you feel about this?

Cheers,

Liam

[gertd]

Hi Liam, I created bindings 9 months ago, please see https://github.com/aserto-dev/rs-authorizer, but I have not been keeping up with the rust tool chain, so there might be better bindings to be created. Interested in any feedback and suggestions.

[liamwh]

Hi Gert,

Thanks for the swift response.

I haven't had the chance to play around with it yet, but will certainly give any feedback I have when I do. To grasp the model more deeply I intend to play with the API using node first and visualise it.

For now, I see there are a couple of repos for each API, both under the Aserto org and under the Topaz org. Please forgive my ignorance; are they different or intended to be the same?

And on another note, and perhaps I'm mistaken, but I don't believe the SDK is being published to crates.io right? If that's the case, then I feel a logical next step would be to set up some CD around this and automatically publish crate versions to crates.io (I think ideally with the version numbers having some correlation to the API/protobuf version). This release process can be automated with release-plz if you're open to the suggestion.

Cheers,

Liam

[liamwh]

And if this is helpful, the Rust client generation can be done with tonic.

[gertd]

topaz is the open-source authorizer & directory, which can be used standalone or function as the edge authorizer when combined with the hosted Aserto authorization and directory services. Both implement the same protobuf gRPC contracts hosted in the pb-authorizer and pb-directory repos.

The Rust bindings are currently not published to crates.io as we did not have a lot of validation that the current packaging is idiomatic Rust and usable as-is. When we created this, the Rust gRPC support was very much in flux, which did not, since it is not our first and main language, we want to make sure we do this right.

[liamwh]

Thanks for the clarification, and no problem on the Rust holdup: I can appreciate the perspective of wanting to make sure you get things right. As far as I'm aware, Tonic is very must the standard for gRPC Client/Server generation in Rust.

For what it's worth, I've used Tonic to create a server in Rust from a protobuf and it worked flawlessly out of the box (minus the logic I had to write of course), and I can only imagine the client generation using Tonic is of the same quality. In fact, according to the gRPC-web GitHub page, Tonic is currently one of only two libraries (the other being for the JVM) to support grpc-web server generation out of the box. I feel this makes Topaz an excellent choice to generate an aserto/topaz client. I'd be more than happy to beta test a client before you hook it up to CD that publishes to crates.io if that is something you'd like that?