Foreign Function Interface

The term for the means for a language to access code written in other languages (see Combining Languages).

Typically, high-level language programmers try to access the wealth of code libraries painfully written in C (and sometimes Assembly) by the lower-level coders. For this, they need some FFI that will allow to specify the way this can be done, hopefully in an automated way. However, the type declarations of low-level languages are often not enough to fully automatically deduce the nicest way (or a correct way, to begin with) to interface with high-level semantics (types, GC, etc.). Hence the need of quite elaborate software packages and FFI databases to deal with the complexity of it all.


Pages in this topic: FFIGEN   Forklift   ILU   SWIG   UFFI  


Also linked from: FFI