ffi-1.0.11 Documentation

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
  ffi_lib 'c'
  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.