What is this
May 19, 2026 · View on GitHub
This repo tries to give an overview over the landscape of the the different dbus implementations that exists in the rust ecosystem.
- https://github.com/KillingSpark/rustbus
- https://github.com/diwic/dbus-rs/ (bindings to C library)
- https://github.com/diwic/dbus-rs/tree/master/dbus-native
- https://github.com/dbus2/zbus/
- https://github.com/Arnavion/dbus-pure
- https://github.com/srwalter/dbus-bytestream
- https://github.com/LinkTed/dbus-message-parser
- https://github.com/cmaves/async-rustbus
- https://github.com/gtk-rs/gtk-rs-core
Note that I am the author of rustbus, but of course I am trying to be as objective as possible here.
Current state
Some benchmarks exist. I plan to add equivalent ones for the missing libs, and more kinds of benchmarks.
The benchmarks
- MarshalMix: Build a signal message with mixed params and marshal it
- MarshalBigArray: Build a signal message with a big u64 array and marshal it
- MarshalStrArray: Build a signal message with a big String array and marshal it
- Marshal + Send: Connect to the sessionbus, build a signal and send it to the bus
The dbus-message-parser does not provide any means of sending messages, so this benchmark is omitted.
Current results
I am running this on a Ryzen 3800X (/proc/cpuinfo says: AMD Ryzen 7 3800X). Your values might vary a bit.
I used rustc 1.95.0 (59807616e 2026-04-14) to run these benchmarks.
To replicate these results just run: cargo bench. That will run all benchmarks.
| Library | MarshalMixed | MarshalBigStrArray | MarshalBigArray | Marshal + Send |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| rustbus | 3.4442 µs | 98.406 µs | 2.2243 µs | 127.45 µs |
| dbus-rs | 169.14 µs | 1.9275 ms | 393.13 µs | 285.30 µs |
| dbus-native | 2.9645 µs | 272.11 µs | 45.946 µs | 81.642 µs |
| dbus-bytestream | 12.875 µs | 1.1294 ms | 151.96 µs | 102.11 µs |
| dbus-message-parser | 40.201 µs | 4.7009 ms | 792.06 µs | NaN |
| dbus-pure | 12.905 µs | 270.84 µs | 21.077 µs | 91.391 µs |
| zvariant | 9.5993 µs | 229.79 µs | 75.775 µs | 145.99 µs |
| zvariant-derive | 9.6960 µs | 231.98 µs | 79.295 µs | 147.36 µs |
| rustbus-async | 4.1619 µs | 104.90 µs | 2.2733 µs | 149.61 µs |
| glib | 35.476 µs | 2.8925 ms | 1.1315 ms | 215.65 µs |