LuaJIT FFI++

FFI++ is a C++ FFI for LuaJIT 2.0+.

Supported Platforms/Compilers:

FFI++ supports any compiler that can generate Itanium C++ ABI-compliant symbols, as well as MSVC-style symbols on Windows.

Windows:

• Visual Studio 2005+ (MSVC-style symbols)
• Clang (Itanium and MSVC-style symbols)
• GCC 3.0+ (Itanium-style symbols)

Linux, Mac OS X:

• GCC 3.0+ (Itanium-style symbols)
• Clang (Itanium-style symbols)

Creating a Binding

The binding generator presently only works with MSVC-style symbols on Windows.

What You Need

There are two platform sets bindings should support to cover most compilers. MSVC-style symbols can be generated by Visual Studio (Windows-only) or Clang (everything). Itanium-style symbols can be generated by pretty much everything else, notably Clang (everything) and GCC 3.0+ (everything).

This means that if you have a clang installation, you can generate bindings for all possible cases. Otherwise, you'll need Visual Studio and one other compiler.

On Windows, you'll need dumpbin.exe, which you can get from Visual Studio.

On Linux, you'll need nm, which comes with GCC on Linux.

For MSVC-style symbol binding generation with the included binding generator, you'll also need a copy of undname.exe, which you can get from Visual Studio (Express or otherwise) or from WINE, if you're on another platform.

For Itanium-style symbol binding generation, you'll need nm, which comes with GCC on Linux and GNU BinUtils on Windows, which can come from MinGW, Cygwin, or elsewhere.

Actually Creating the Binding

For every symbol style you need to support, you'll need a copy of the library compiled with that symbol style. For this example, I've compiled my example file, HelloWorld.cpp into two assemblies, HelloWorld-msvc.dll and HelloWorld-itanium.dll. I'm planning to rename them to HelloWorld.dll when I distribute my application, removing the compiler suffix.

To produce a binding with these inputs and the desired assembly name, I would execute a command like this:

luajit ljgenbinding.lua --output=HelloWorld.ffipp HelloWorld-msvc.dll

This produces a file named HelloWorld.fipp that can be loaded by FFI++ at runtime. It will automatically load an assembly named 'HelloWorld' at runtime.

Using a Binding

See the examples directory for directions on using a binding.

Notes

• Some compilers will not export symbols of member functions with inline definitions. If you notice a missing constructor after generating a binding, modifying the code or filling in the missing method in Lua might be necessary.