It seems like rust doesn't let me have a workspace as 'main' project, so instead I solved by adding a new crate that import all workspace members and reexport them with the features key in the Cargo.toml and the #[cfg(feature)] annotation in the lib.rs for each member.

Rust automatically statically links native Rust dependencies, which has that effect.

As for dependencies written in C, it's up to the author of the bindings to provide something like the sdl2 crate's static-link feature flag.

Rust works the same way as C or C++ in that respect... it's just that there's no standard way to ask for static linking in C or C++ because there's no standard build system in C or C++.

(And the reason you need to statically link to bundle C/C++/Rust libraries is because it's the OS that loads dynamic libraries, nor your application, so you're not in the loop when it looks at the filesystem to find them.)

As for GStreamer specifically:

• On Linux, it's generally expected that you'll depend on the system GStreamer and let your packaging system handle it. (eg. Flatpak provides GStreamer as part of the shared runtime and an org.freedesktop.Sdk.Extension.rust-stable package you can specify as an SDK extension in your manifest to make the rust toolchain available while running flatpak-builder.)

• On Windows, Inno Setup is the simplest way I know to bundle external library files.

• On macOS, application distribution is generally a "Package" (Folder with a special extension and metadata file that Finder treats like a single-file executable) inside a .dmg disk image. You need a mac or a CI service which offers macs to build those.

You most certainly want to use bindgen to generate the function definitions in Rust from the C header file.

There is an excellent step-by-step tutorial that creates such a binding for the bzip2 library. It should give you an idea of the steps required to achieve what you need.