husk

Provides APIs useful for itch and itch-setup.

husk provides:

• A Rust interface (this crate, as a "lib")
• A C interface (this crate, as a "staticlib"), with a header generated with cbindgen
• A Go interface, with cgo bindings generated c-for-go (lowhusk), and higher-level bindings written by hand (husk).

See the build script in release/build.js.

Intent

The idea is, at first, to be able to let libbutler (see valet) use components written in Rust, like shortcut creation on Windows with proper Unicode handling, using the IShellLink COM interface.

Over time, more and more code from libbutler could be migrated to either husk or valet. For example, valet could handle all the JSON-RPC messaging, and husk could handle the itch.io REST API calls, downloads, extraction, sandboxing, etc.

Eventually, libbutler could be completely retired - connecting valet and husk directly. Which should be relatively effortless, as husk already exposes a Rust interface.

Using husk from Go

...is awkward. Packages that use husk will never be go get-able.

husk first needs to be built and installed somewhere - but it links statically, so at least the headache is only at build time.

The idea right now is to build binaries in CI, upload them to GitHub releases, and have the build scripts for itch-setup and libbutler download the binaries to a vendor/ directory or something, with replace directives in their go.mod, like the sample Go binary in this repo has.