About

This is a library for calling C function and manipulating C types from Ravi. It is designed to be interface compatible with the FFI library in LuaJIT's ffi. It can parse C function declarations and struct definitions that have been directly copied out of C header files and into lua source as a string.

This project is a fork of https://github.com/facebook/luaffifb which is a fork of https://github.com/jmckaskill/luaffi.

Source

https://github.com/dibyendumajumdar/ravi-ffi

Platforms

Currently being developed for:

• Linux x64 - builds and tests pass
• OS X x64 - builds and tests pass
• Windows 10 x64 - builds and tests pass

Ravi and Lua 5.3 are supported.

Build

This project requires:

• CMake installation
• Ravi 5.3 installation

Windows 10

• Note that only Visual Studio 2017 is supported.
• Note that only x86-64 is supported

In the instructions below, we assume that Ravi was installed under c:/Software/ravi.

git clone https://github.com/dibyendumajumdar/ravi-ffi
cd ravi-ffi
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/Software/Ravi -G "Visual Studio 15 2017 Win64" ..

Above creates Visual Studio projects which can be used to build and install. Note that the install prefix ensures that the DLL files will be installed under /Software/ravi/bin so that they can be found by the library.

To build for Lua, change above to:

cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/Software/lua53 -DUSE_LUA53=ON -G "Visual Studio 15 2017 Win64" ..

This assumes Lua 5.3 installation under `/Software/lua53'.

Documentation

This library is designed to be source compatible with LuaJIT's FFI extension. The documentation at http://luajit.org/ext_ffi.html describes the API and semantics.

Pointer Comparison

Use ffi.NULL instead of nil when checking for NULL pointers.

  ffi.new('void *', 0) == ffi.NULL -- true

Known Issues

• Comparing a ctype pointer to nil doesn't work the same as in LuaJIT (see above). This is unfixable with the current metamethod semantics.
• Constant expressions can't handle non integer intermediate values (eg offsetof won't work because it manipulates pointers)
• Not all metamethods work with Lua 5.1 (eg char* + number). This is due to the way metamethods are looked up with mixed types in Lua 5.1. If you need this upgrade to Lua 5.2 or use boxed numbers (uint64_t and uintptr_t).
• All bitfields are treated as unsigned (does anyone even use signed bitfields?). Note that "int s:8" is unsigned on unix x86/x64, but signed on windows.

How it works

Types are represented by a struct ctype structure and an associated user value table. The table is shared between all related types for structs, unions, and functions. It's members have the types of struct members, function argument types, etc. The struct ctype structure then contains the modifications from the base type (eg number of pointers, array size, etc).

Types are pushed into lua as a userdata containing the struct ctype with a user value (or fenv in 5.1) set to the shared type table.

Boxed cdata types are pushed into lua as a userdata containing the struct cdata structure (which contains the struct ctype of the data as its header) followed by the boxed data.

The functions in ffi.C provide the cdata and ctype metatables and ffi.* functions which manipulate these two types.

C functions (and function pointers) are pushed into lua as a lua c function with the function pointer cdata as the first upvalue. The actual code is JITed using dynasm (see call_x86.dasc). The JITed code does the following in order:

1. Calls the needed unpack functions in ffi.C placing each argument on the HW stack
2. Updates errno
3. Performs the C call
4. Retrieves errno
5. Pushes the result back into lua from the HW register or stack