voutilad / ffi

A purego binding for libffi.

ffi

A purego binding for libffi.

Purpose

You can use purego to call C code without cgo. ffi provides extra functionality (e.g. passing and returning structs by value).

Requirements

OS/Architecture

• freebsd/amd64
• freebsd/arm64
• linux/amd64
• linux/arm64
• windows/amd64
• windows/arm64

Software

libffi is preinstalled on most distributions, because it also is a dependency of Python and Ruby. If not, you can install it explicitly:

Arch Linux

sudo pacman -S libffi

Debian 12, Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 24.04

sudo apt install libffi8

Debian 11, Ubuntu 20.04

sudo apt install libffi7

FreeBSD

pkg install libffi

Note: Use this -gcflags="github.com/ebitengine/purego/internal/fakecgo=-std" build flag when cross compiling or having CGO_ENABLED set to 0 (FreeBSD only).

Windows

You need a libffi-8.dll next to the executable/root folder of your project or inside C:\Windows\System32. If you don't want to build libffi from source, you can find this dll for example inside the Windows embeddable package of Python.

Examples

In this example we use the puts function inside the standard C library to print "Hello World!" to the console:

int puts(const char *s);

package main

import (
	"unsafe"

	"github.com/ebitengine/purego"
	"github.com/jupiterrider/ffi"
	"golang.org/x/sys/unix"
)

func main() {
	// open the C library
	libm, err := purego.Dlopen("libc.so.6", purego.RTLD_LAZY)
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}

	// get the address of puts
	puts, err := purego.Dlsym(libm, "puts")
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}

	// describe the function's signature
	var cif ffi.Cif
	if status := ffi.PrepCif(&cif, ffi.DefaultAbi, 1, &ffi.TypeSint32, &ffi.TypePointer); status != ffi.OK {
		panic(status)
	}

	// convert the go string into a pointer
	text, _ := unix.BytePtrFromString("Hello World!")

	// call the puts function
	var result ffi.Arg
	ffi.Call(&cif, puts, unsafe.Pointer(&result), unsafe.Pointer(&text))
}

You can find more examples inside the examples folder of this repository.