colstrom / ffi_gen

A generator for Ruby FFI bindings, directly from header files via LLVM's Clang compiler

A generator for Ruby FFI bindings

Author: Richard Musiol Contributors: Jeremy Voorhis (thanks for the initial idea) License: MIT (see LICENSE)

Testing Loca chanes

gem build ffi_gen.gemspec
sudo gem install ./ffi_gen-1.2.0.gem

Features

• Generation of FFI methods, structures, unions, enumerations and callbacks
• Generation of YARD documentation comments
• Tested with headers of the following libraries:
  • Cairo
  • CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework)
  • Clang
  • LibSSH2
  • LLVM
  • OpenGL
  • SQLite3

Requirements

• Ruby 1.9
• Clang 3.5 or later (Download the binaries or build from source configured with --enable-shared)

These requirements are only for running the generator. The generated files are Ruby 1.8 compatible and do not need Clang.

Example

Use the following interface in a script or Rake task:

require "ffi_gen"

FFIGen.generate(
  module_name: "Clang",
  ffi_lib:     "clang",
  headers:     ["clang-c/Index.h"],
  cflags:      `llvm-config --cflags`.split(" "),
  prefixes:    ["clang_", "CX"],
  output:      "clang-c/index.rb"
)

Output: clang-c/index.rb

Other generated files can be found in the test/output directory.

Hints

You may need to set additional include directories:

export CPATH=/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/4.6.1/include

Your GCC include paths can be seen with:

`gcc -print-prog-name=cc1` -v

Projects using ffi_gen

• https://github.com/jvoorhis/ruby-llvm

Roadmap

• Support for more libraries:
  • (Write me if you have a whish)
• Automatic generation of object oriented wrappers
• Polish YARD documentation comments some more

Feedback

Please use GitHub's issue tracker for problems or suggestions. Pull requests are welcome, too.