This is an attempt to translate and hopefully go on to expose Linux system calls that will be following: The Linux Programming Interface by Michael Kerrisk http://man7.org/tlpi/ which has an impressive source distribution found at: http://man7.org/tlpi/code/index.html The native calls to libc are done with the excellent ruby ffi gem. You can use: readelf -s --wide libcairo.so.2 to get the symbols out of a elf shared library.