Using Rust 🦀 for VCV Rack modules

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Disclaimers

  • This is NOT a how-to…
  • I was just interested in if using Rust instead of C++ was even possible.
  • I am not a C or Rust expert, I used Gemini Pro 3 & Claude Sonnet 4.5 AI coding agents to help me get it working, and then to annotate the code.
  • I wrote the code on MacOS ARM, no other platforms have been tested, I thoroughly failed to get this to link in my Windows 11 MSYS2 MinGW64 environment.
  • I make no assertions that using Rust for Rack modules is desirable, efficient, wise or even moral. :innocent:
  • In short, don’t blame me, blame the AI, I was just having fun hacking on some code

With that out of the way, I present a little GitHub repo that I made which uses Rust to implement the DSP code for a mono and poly sine wave oscillator.

The mono version uses the Rust crate fundsp

The poly version uses a Taylor-like polynomial & Bhaskara’s sine approximation.

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As mentioned above, this currently only works on MacOS ARM, if you happen to get it working on another platform, or have any other fixes for that matter, please do create a PR.

edit: forgot to mention, Rust core::simd is not stable yet, so this code uses the nightly channel, this potentially could be a stumbling block for other platforms, even though it is supposed to be portable_simd

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FWIW for VCV 3, for a number of reasons, Andrew is working on making it a completely “C” API.

This moves it from being strictly C++ and a specific known compiler and toolchain, to a standardized and portable ABI that can easily be used from any language that supports the “C” ABI. These include Rust, Zig, C, C++, C# – basically any modern compiled language.

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Yeah, i saw some of that in the discord livestream, it was probably an unconscious influence in me creating this experiment, it’s quite exciting actually…