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.

• 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 (http://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 LGPL3 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 otherwide contributed to the success of this project:

• Alban Peignier alban.peignier@free.fr
• Aman Gupta aman@tmm1.net
• Andrea Fazzi andrea.fazzi@alcacoop.it
• Andreas Niederl rico32@gmx.net
• Andrew Cholakian andrew@andrewvc.com
• Antonio Terceiro terceiro@softwarelivre.org
• Brian Candler B.Candler@pobox.com
• Brian D. Burns burns180@gmail.com
• Bryan Kearney bkearney@redhat.com
• Charlie Savage cfis@zerista.com
• Chikanaga Tomoyuki nagachika00@gmail.com
• Hongli Lai hongli@phusion.nl
• Ian MacLeod ian@nevir.net
• Jake Douglas jake@shiftedlabs.com
• Jean-Dominique Morani jdmorani@mac.com
• Jeremy Hinegardner jeremy@hinegardner.org
• Jesús García Sáez blaxter@gmail.com
• Joe Khoobyar joe@ankhcraft.com
• Jurij Smakov jurij@wooyd.org
• KISHIMOTO, Makoto ksmakoto@dd.iij4u.or.jp
• Kim Burgestrand kim@burgestrand.se
• Lars Kanis kanis@comcard.de
• Luc Heinrich luc@honk-honk.com
• Luis Lavena luislavena@gmail.com
• Matijs van Zuijlen matijs@matijs.net
• Matthew King automatthew@gmail.com
• Mike Dalessio mike.dalessio@gmail.com
• NARUSE, Yui naruse@airemix.jp
• Park Heesob phasis@gmail.com
• Shin Yee shinyee@speedgocomputing.com
• Stephen Bannasch stephen.bannasch@gmail.com
• Suraj N. Kurapati sunaku@gmail.com
• Sylvain Daubert sylvain.daubert@laposte.net
• Victor Costan
• beoran@gmail.com
• ctide christide@christide.com
• emboss Martin.Bosslet@googlemail.com
• hobophobe unusualtears@gmail.com
• meh meh@paranoici.org
• postmodern postmodern.mod3@gmail.com
• wycats@gmail.com wycats@gmail.com
• Wayne Meissner wmeissner@gmail.com