Writing FFI bindings by hand is tedious and error-prone. The signatures must match the C ABI exactly, the types must map correctly, and a single mistake produces undefined behavior that may not surface until runtime. bindgen and cbindgen automate the two directions of this translation: bindgen reads a C header and generates Rust extern declarations,…
Rust’s Foreign Function Interface is the mechanism by which Rust code calls functions written in C, and by which C code calls functions written in Rust. The boundary is marked by extern blocks, and every call across it is unsafe because the compiler cannot verify that the foreign function upholds Rust’s memory safety invariants. The…
Raw pointers are Rust’s mechanism for expressing memory access that the compiler cannot verify. A *const T is a pointer that permits reading; a *mut T is a pointer that permits reading and writing. Creating either is safe. Dereferencing either requires an unsafe block because the compiler cannot prove that the pointer is non-null, aligned,…
A quick-reference for the Dart language, VM internals, and toolchain. No prose — just the facts. Language Basics Types & Null Safety Expression Result null is Object false null is Object? true 1 is num true 1.0 is int false List<int> is List<num> true (covariant) List<num> is List<int> false Null-Aware Operators Op Meaning ?. Null-aware…
This chapter traces a single object from the moment it is allocated to the moment its memory is reclaimed. The path is not a straight line. An object begins in the new space, allocated through a thread-local buffer with a bump pointer. If it survives a scavenge, it is promoted to the old space. If…
Dart’s AOT compilation makes it unusually well-suited to containerization. dart compile exe produces a native binary that starts in milliseconds, and the official dart:stable image provides a /runtime/ directory containing only the minimal system libraries that binary needs. The standard pattern is a multi-stage build: compile in the SDK image, copy the binary and the…
Porting a utility from Node.js or Python to Dart is not a single translation step. It is a sequence of decisions: which Dart libraries replace the source language’s standard library, whether the runtime dependencies can be satisfied without a native addon, and how the final artifact is compiled and distributed. The destination is a standalone…
A custom transpiler or DSL parser in Dart is not a single program but a pipeline of three cooperating components: a lexer that turns source text into tokens, a parser that turns tokens into a syntax tree, and a code generator or evaluator that walks the tree and produces output. The architecture is the same…
Dart targets the web through two distinct compilation pipelines that share a common frontend but diverge at the back end. dart2js translates Dart into JavaScript, using an SSA-based intermediate representation and a closed-world assumption to perform whole-program optimizations before emitting JavaScript that browsers can execute directly. dart2wasm translates Dart into WebAssembly, targeting the WasmGC proposal…
This chapter is a condensed reference for the JavaScript language and its runtime environment. It is organized for lookup, not for reading. Each table covers one topic, and each entry is a fact that has a precise answer. The entries are drawn from the ECMAScript specification, the MDN documentation, and the behaviors that are verified…