Detailed Techniques

Signal Members

We’ve covered how to pass signals[1] between Dart and Rust in the previous tutorial section. Now Let’s delve into the meaning of each field of a signal.

• Field message: It represents a message of a type annotated by a signal trait. This field is always filled.

• Field binary: This is a field designed to handle large binary data, potentially up to a few gigabytes. You can send any kind of binary data you wish, such as a high-resolution image or file data. This field carries empty Uint8List or Vec<u8> if the message is not marked as binary signal.

It’s important to note that creating a signal larger than a few megabytes is not recommended. For large data, split them into multiple signals, or use the binary field instead.[2]

Generation Path

When you generate message code using the rinf gen command, the resulting Dart modules will be placed under lib/src/bindings folder by default.

Continuous Watching

If you add the optional argument -w or --watch to the rinf gen command, the message code will be automatically generated when Rust files are modified. If you add this argument, the command will not exit on its own.

CLI

rinf gen --watch

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[1]

Rinf relies solely on native FFI for communication, avoiding the use of web protocols or hidden threads. The goal is to minimize performance overhead as much as possible.

[2]

Sending a serialized message or binary data is a zero-copy operation from Rust to Dart, while it involves a copy operation from Dart to Rust in memory. Keep in mind that Serde’s serialization and deserialization does involve memory copy.