Bringing It Together --- Exercise

In this exercise, you're going to add a whole new Chromium feature, bringing together everything you already learned.

The Brief from Product Management

A community of pixies has been discovered living in a remote rainforest. It's important that we get Chromium for Pixies delivered to them as soon as possible.

The requirement is to translate all Chromium's UI strings into Pixie language.

There's not time to wait for proper translations, but fortunately pixie language is very close to English, and it turns out there's a Rust crate which does the translation.

In fact, you already imported that crate in the previous exercise.

(Obviously, real translations of Chrome require incredible care and diligence. Don't ship this!)

Steps

Modify ResourceBundle::MaybeMangleLocalizedString so that it uwuifies all strings before display. In this special build of Chromium, it should always do this irrespective of the setting of mangle_localized_strings_.

If you've done everything right across all these exercises, congratulations, you should have created Chrome for pixies!

Chromium UI screenshot with uwu language
Students will likely need some hints here. Hints include:
  • UTF16 vs UTF8. Students should be aware that Rust strings are always UTF8, and will probably decide that it's better to do the conversion on the C++ side using base::UTF16ToUTF8 and back again.
  • If students decide to do the conversion on the Rust side, they'll need to consider String::from_utf16, consider error handling, and consider which CXX supported types can transfer a lot of u16s.
  • Students may design the C++/Rust boundary in several different ways, e.g. taking and returning strings by value, or taking a mutable reference to a string. If a mutable reference is used, CXX will likely tell the student that they need to use Pin. You may need to explain what Pin does, and then explain why CXX needs it for mutable references to C++ data: the answer is that C++ data can't be moved around like Rust data, because it may contain self-referential pointers.
  • The C++ target containing ResourceBundle::MaybeMangleLocalizedString will need to depend on a rust_static_library target. The student probably already did this.
  • The rust_static_library target will need to depend on //third_party/rust/uwuify/v0_2:lib.