How to implement the RVExtension function for an ArmA 3 DLL in Rust?

Question

I'm trying to write a DLL extension for ArmA 3 and the game docs say:

The dll is expected to contain an entry point of a form _RVExtension@12, with a following C signature:

void __stdcall RVExtension(char *output, int outputSize, const char *function);

A part of C++ code example is:

// ...

extern "C" {
    __declspec(dllexport) void __stdcall RVExtension(
        char *output,
        int outputSize,
        const char *function
    ); 
};

void __stdcall RVExtension(
    char *output,
    int outputSize,
    const char *function
) {
    outputSize -= 1;
    strncpy(output,function,outputSize);
}

The docs also have plenty of examples in other languages like: C#, D and even Pascal, but those don't help me much, because I don't have a good understanding their FFI =(.

I'm stuck with the following Rust code:

#[no_mangle]
pub extern "stdcall" fn RVExtension(
    game_output: *mut c_char,
    output_size: c_int,
    game_input: *const c_char
) {
    // ...
}

But ArmA refuses to call it.

Answer 1

Thanks to @Shepmaster's advice about Dependency Walker, I was able to discover that the problem was in the function's name mangling. I expected the function name would be transformed into _name@X, but it wasn't. RVExtension was exported literally, and ArmA wasn't able to find it by the name _RVExtension@12.

It is strange, but it seems like the compiler version may play a part. I tried ~8 different versions, and was able to make it work only with Rust nightly 1.8 (GNU ABI) 32-bit.

The working code is:

#![feature(libc)]
extern crate libc;

use libc::{strncpy, size_t};

use std::os::raw::c_char;
use std::ffi::{CString, CStr};
use std::str;

#[allow(non_snake_case)]
#[no_mangle]
/// copy the input to the output
pub extern "stdcall" fn _RVExtension(
    response_ptr: *mut c_char,
    response_size: size_t,
    request_ptr: *const c_char,
) {
    // get str from arma
    let utf8_arr: &[u8] = unsafe { CStr::from_ptr(request_ptr).to_bytes() };
    let request: &str = str::from_utf8(utf8_arr).unwrap();

    // send str to arma
    let response: *const c_char = CString::new(request).unwrap().as_ptr();
    unsafe { strncpy(response_ptr, response, response_size) };
}

It is also possible to rewrite the function into:

#[export_name="_RVExtension"]
pub extern "stdcall" fn RVExtension(

Some other Rust compilers may also work with:

#[export_name="_RVExtension@12"]
pub extern "stdcall" fn RVExtension(

But, for example, nightly 1.8 (MSVC ABI) 32-bit with VS 2015 will not allow @ symbol and throws an error at compilation time. The MSVC version will not add @12 by itself.

Other compilers may add @12 and the function will be exported as _RVExtension@12@12.

---

It's also worth mentioning that ArmA is 32-bit app, so it does not work with a 64-bit DLL.