Even after a decade of Rust, a surprising amount of the ecosystem still depends on C libraries—from massive, hard-to-port projects like Samba to closed-source vendor-provided dylibs.

In this talk, I walk through both real-world and edge case challenges of vendoring C code inside Rust crates:

- building C libraries at compile time
- statically linking them via FFI
- customising builds with flags
- dealing with cases where static linking isn’t possible.

I'll also show how to embed shared objects directly into Rust crates, which is crazy, but extremely interesting and useful in some cases.

Whether someone needs portability, consistency, or just wants to survive the chaos of mixed-language builds, this session will provide the tools to do it confidently.