vezel-dev / libffi

A friendly libffi fork with a Zig build script and bindings.
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bindings build c ffi interop zig

Vezel libffi Fork

This is a friendly fork of libffi. The notable changes made in this fork are the additions of a Zig build script, making it easy to integrate libffi into Zig projects using the Zig package manager, and a set of idiomatic Zig bindings for libffi's main API. Additionally, to reduce the package download size, we have removed a large number of files that are unnecessary when using libffi in a Zig project. Importantly, all library source code is identical to upstream, so in terms of API/ABI compatibility, using this fork is no different from linking to a system libffi package.

Usage

The minimum Zig version supported by this project can be found in the minimum_zig_version field of the build.zig.zon file. We generally try to track the latest release of Zig. But do note that the master branch may sometimes contain code that only works with a master build of Zig.

Please note that the master branch is rebased on top of upstream periodically. You should use a release tag rather than master. For example:

zig fetch --save=ffi https://github.com/vezel-dev/libffi/archive/vX.Y.Z-B.tar.gz
# Or, to use Git:
zig fetch --save=ffi git+https://github.com/vezel-dev/libffi.git#vX.Y.Z-B

(You can find the latest version on the releases page.)

Consume the library in your build.zig:

const ffi = b.dependency("ffi", .{
    .target = target,
    .optimize = optimize,
});

exe.root_module.addImport("ffi", ffi.module("ffi"));

if (b.systemIntegrationOption("ffi", .{})) {
    exe.linkSystemLibrary("ffi");
} else {
    exe.linkLibrary(ffi.artifact("ffi"));
}

You can now use the Zig bindings in your code:

const builtin = @import("builtin");
const std = @import("std");
const stdio = @cImport(@cInclude("stdio.h"));
const ffi = @import("ffi");

pub fn main() !void {
    std.debug.print("Calling C puts() on {s}.\n", .{builtin.cpu.arch.genericName()});

    var func: ffi.Function = undefined;
    var params = [_]*ffi.Type{
        ffi.types.pointer,
    };

    try func.prepare(ffi.Abi.default, params.len, params[0..params.len], ffi.types.sint32);

    var result: ffi.uarg = undefined;
    var args = [params.len]*anyopaque{
        @ptrCast(@constCast(&"Hello World")),
    };

    func.call(&stdio.puts, args[0..args.len], &result);

    if (result == stdio.EOF) return error.IOError;
}

And finally:

$ zig build run
Calling C puts() on x86.
Hello World

Cross-compilation works too:

$ zig build run -fqemu -Dtarget=aarch64-linux
Calling C puts() on aarch64.
Hello World

License

This project is licensed under the terms found in LICENSE; this file is unchanged from upstream.