ruby-ffi

by Wayne Meissner
http://wiki.github.com/ffi/ffi

DESCRIPTION:

Ruby-FFI is a ruby extension for programmatically loading dynamic libraries, binding functions within them, and calling those functions from Ruby code. Moreover, a Ruby-FFI extension works without changes on Ruby and JRuby. Discover why should you write your next extension using Ruby-FFI here.

FEATURES/PROBLEMS:

  • It has a very intuitive DSL

  • It supports all C native types

  • It supports C structs (also nested), enums and global variables

  • It supports callbacks

  • It has smart methods to handle memory management of pointers and structs

SYNOPSIS:

require 'ffi'

module MyLib
  extend FFI::Library
  attach_function :puts, [ :string ], :int
end

MyLib.puts 'Hello boys using libc!'

For less minimalistic and more sane examples you may look at:

  • the samples/ folder

  • the examples on the wiki

  • the projects using FFI listed on this page

REQUIREMENTS:

  • You need a sane building environment in order to compile the extension.

DOWNLOAD/INSTALL:

From rubyforge:

[sudo] gem install ffi

or from the git repository on github:

git clone git://github.com/ffi/ffi.git
cd ffi
rake gem:install

CREDITS:

Special thanks to:

  • Yehuda Katz

  • Luc Heinrich

  • Andrea Fazzi

  • Mike Dalessio

  • Hongli Lai

  • Evan Phoenix

  • Aman Gupta

  • Beoran

LICENSE:

See LICENSE file.