Introduction

rust-samp is a Rust toolkit for building server plugins for SA-MP (San Andreas Multiplayer) and native components for Open Multiplayer. The same compiled binary works on both servers: SA-MP loads it through the legacy plugin ABI, and Open Multiplayer loads it as a first-class component without any extra configuration.

Fork of samp-rs by ZOTTCE. Modernized for Rust edition 2024 and extended with a pure-Rust implementation of the Open Multiplayer component ABI (Itanium and MSVC), without bindgen or any C/C++ dependency.

Why Rust

Traditional plugins are written in C/C++, where memory errors (buffer overflow, use-after-free, dangling pointers) are the leading cause of server crashes. Rust eliminates those bugs at compile time while keeping performance on par with C.

rust-samp adds, on top of that foundation:

• Native derivation via the #[native] attribute — no manual FFI boilerplate.
• Automatic argument parsing from AMX cells into Rust types.
• Panic-safe wrappers — panics inside a native are caught and logged instead of aborting the server process.
• AmxString with Deref<Target = str> — every &str method is available without .to_string(); the decoded string is computed once and cached.
• Typed Pawn arrays — Buffer::get_as::<f32> / set_as::<bool> / iter_as::<T> cover Float: and bool: arrays without manual bit manipulation.
• Optional encoding feature — Windows-1251 / Windows-1252 string conversion via encoding_rs.
• Turnkey logger — samp::enable_logger!() installs a complete pipeline (per-plugin file, size-based rotation into logs/archive/, banner, runtime-adjustable level) in a single call. Customizable via LoggerConfig or DIY through samp::plugin::logger() for advanced cases. Routes to the server's own log sink (logprintf on SA-MP, ICore::logLnU8 on native Open Multiplayer) alongside the file.
• Native Open Multiplayer support — pure-Rust implementation of the component ABI (Itanium and MSVC) so a single binary works as a SA-MP plugin and as an Open Multiplayer component.

Workspace structure

Crate	Version	Description
samp	3.1.0	Main crate — depend on this one. Re-exports the SDK and the proc macros.
samp-sdk	3.0.0	Low-level bindings: AMX VM + Open Multiplayer component ABI.
samp-codegen	1.3.0	Procedural macros (#[native], initialize_plugin!, SampPlugin).

In practice, only the samp crate is referenced by a plugin's Cargo.toml. It re-exports everything from samp-sdk and samp-codegen.

A first taste

use samp::prelude::*;
use samp::{native, initialize_plugin, SampPlugin};

#[derive(SampPlugin, Default)]
struct Plugin;

impl Plugin {
    #[native(name = "TestNative")]
    fn my_native(&mut self, _amx: &Amx, text: &AmxString) -> AmxResult<bool> {
        println!("rust plugin: {}", &**text);
        Ok(true)
    }
}

initialize_plugin!(
    type: Plugin,
    natives: [Plugin::my_native],
);

The next chapters set up the toolchain and walk through a plugin from scratch.