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 you should write your next extension using Ruby-FFI.

• Intuitive DSL
• Supports all C native types
• C structs (also nested), enums and global variables
• Callbacks from C to ruby
• Automatic garbage collection of native memory

require 'ffi'

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

MyLib.puts 'Hello, World 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 (https://wiki.github.com/ffi/ffi/projects-using-ffi)

You need a sane building environment in order to compile the extension. At a minimum, you will need:

• A C compiler (e.g. Xcode on OSX, gcc on everything else)
• libffi development library - this is commonly in the libffi-dev or libffi-devel

From rubygems:

[sudo] gem install ffi

or from the git repository on github:

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

The ffi library is covered by the BSD license, also see the LICENSE file. The specs are shared with Rubyspec and are licensed by the same license as Rubyspec, see the LICENSE.SPECS file.

The following people have submitted code, bug reports, or otherwise contributed to the success of this project:

• Alban Peignier [email protected]
• Aman Gupta [email protected]
• Andrea Fazzi [email protected]
• Andreas Niederl [email protected]
• Andrew Cholakian [email protected]
• Antonio Terceiro [email protected]
• Brian Candler [email protected]
• Brian D. Burns [email protected]
• Bryan Kearney [email protected]
• Charlie Savage [email protected]
• Chikanaga Tomoyuki [email protected]
• Hongli Lai [email protected]
• Ian MacLeod [email protected]
• Jake Douglas [email protected]
• Jean-Dominique Morani [email protected]
• Jeremy Hinegardner [email protected]
• Jesús García Sáez [email protected]
• Joe Khoobyar [email protected]
• Jurij Smakov [email protected]
• KISHIMOTO, Makoto [email protected]
• Kim Burgestrand [email protected]
• Lars Kanis [email protected]
• Luc Heinrich [email protected]
• Luis Lavena [email protected]
• Matijs van Zuijlen [email protected]
• Matthew King [email protected]
• Mike Dalessio [email protected]
• NARUSE, Yui [email protected]
• Park Heesob [email protected]
• Shin Yee [email protected]
• Stephen Bannasch [email protected]
• Suraj N. Kurapati [email protected]
• Sylvain Daubert [email protected]
• Victor Costan
• [email protected]
• ctide [email protected]
• emboss [email protected]
• hobophobe [email protected]
• meh [email protected]
• postmodern [email protected]
• [email protected] [email protected]
• Wayne Meissner [email protected]