C/C++ bindings

[RagnarGrootKoerkamp]

@kokyriakidis let's continue here from #9.

So calling Rust from C is relatively straightforward, see here.

We could make a crate simd-minimizers-c where we expose a #[unsafe(no_mangle)] pub extern "C" api that simply forwards to the right functions from the root of the library, with the most important template instantiations.

Would you also like to use PackedSeq input? or just plain ascii text?

I will be out for a week and anyway pretty busy. If you could give this a try yourself that would be great!

• Do cargo new simd-minimizers-c from the root
• Change to [lib] crate-type=['cdylib'], add simd-minimizers as a dependency, and wrap the functions you need.
• Then define a header with corresponding extern void ... functions and include that from your code.
• Lastly build the C code and link against this header.

The c header can also be generated using cbindgen.

[kokyriakidis]

@RagnarGrootKoerkamp I have created the C bindings here:

https://github.com/kokyriakidis/simd-minimizers-c

[RagnarGrootKoerkamp]

Nice! Want to merge them here to a sub-directory, or host them yourself? Either way is fine for me. Also happy to add a link to the readme to your repo otherwise.

Note that it can be more efficient to reuse the internal Sketcher object between calls, but it's nice that right now you only export a minimal API, which keeps things simple.

[kokyriakidis]

I implemented it now using the Sketcher, as you suggested, and I also added the forward-only minimizers API. Please check it.

Either option is fine to me too! We can merge them I guess so that users can have them ready to go immediately. Let me know how you want to do it.

[RagnarGrootKoerkamp]

Sorry for being slow. If you could make a PR to move things into simd-minimizers-c or so and add a note in the readme somewhere that would be great! It would be nice to not pollute the root directory too much, so please see how much you can move into the subdir, or otherwise we can put things in eg bindings/simd-minimizers-c or so?

The Sketcher API looks good at a very quick glance.