cffi-lua

This is a portable C FFI for Lua, based on libffi and aiming to be mostly compatible with LuaJIT FFI, but written from scratch. Compatibility is preserved where reasonable, but not where not easily implementable (e.g. the parser extensions for 64-bit cdata and so on). Thanks to libffi, it works on many operating systems and CPU architectures. The cffi-lua codebase itself does not contain any non-portable code (with the exception of things such as Windows calling convention handling on x86, and some adjustments for big endian architectures). Some effort was also taken to ensure compatibility with custom Lua configurations (e.g. with changed numeric type representations), though this is not tested or guaranteed to work (patches welcome if broken).

Unlike LuaJIT's ffi module or other efforts such as luaffifb, it works with every common version of the reference Lua implementation (currently 5.1, 5.2, 5.3 and 5.4, 5.0 could be supported but wasn't considered worth it) as well as compatible non-reference ones (like LuaJIT). Functionality from newer Lua versions is also supported, when used with that version (e.g. with 5.3+ you will get seamless integer and bit-op support, with 5.4 you will get metatype support for to-be-closed variables, and so on).

Since it's written from scratch, having 1:1 bug-for-bug C parser compatibility is a non-goal. The parser is meant to comply with C11, plus a number of extensions from GCC, MSVC and C++ (where it doesn't conflict with C).

The project was started because there isn't any FFI for standard Lua that's as user friendly as LuaJIT's and doesn't have portability issues.

Current status

See STATUS.md.

Notable differences from LuaJIT

• Equality comparisons against nil always result in false
• Equality comparisons between cdata and Lua values are always false
• Passing unions (or structs containing unions) is not supported on all platforms
• Bitfields are not supported
• Several new API extensions

Equality comparions work this way due to limitations of the Lua metamethod semantics. Use cffi.nullptr instead. The other limitations are caused by libffi not supporting these features portably.

Dependencies

The dependencies are kept intentionally minimal.

• A C++ compiler supporting the right subset of C++14
• Lua 5.1 or newer (tested up to and including 5.4) or equivalent (e.g. LuaJIT)
• libffi
• meson

Optional dependencies:

• pkg-config (for automated Lua finding)
• A Lua executable (only for tests)

These toolchains have been tested:

• GCC 7+ (all platforms)
• Clang 8+ (all platforms)
• Visual Studio 2017+ (with updates)

Other toolchains may also work. The theoretical minimum is GCC 4.8 and Clang 3.4 (an updated VS 2017 is already the minimum, older versions are missing necessary language features). It is ensured that no non-standard extensions are used, so as long as your compiler is C++14 compliant, it should work (technically there are some GCC/Clang/MSVC-specific diagnostic pragmas used, but these are conditional and only used to control warnings).

The module should work on any CPU architecture supported by libffi. The CI system tests a large variety of CPU architectures (see STATUS.md). If you encounter any issues on yours, please send patches or at least report them so they can be fixed.

The pkg-config tool is optional when using -Dlua_version=custom and -Dlibffi=custom (or vendor). However, for custom, you will need to manually specify what to include and link.

Building

On Unix-like systems:

$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ meson ..
$ ninja all

This will configure the module for the default Lua version in your system. If your system does not provide a default lua.pc pkg-config file, you will need to explicitly set the version with e.g. -Dlua_version=5.2 passed to meson. You will also need to do this if you with to compile for a different Lua version than your default lua.pc provides.

By default, a Lua loadable module will be built. This module can be installed in a path that Lua expects. On Unix-like systems, the ninja install target can do that.

There is also an option to build a static library, by passing -Dstatic=true to meson. This is mainly intended for either application usages that will embed the FFI, or for various specialized platforms that do not support shared libraries or don't have a version of Lua configured to support modules. This version is usually not meant to be distributed. To use the static version, you will need to declare the luaopen_cffi symbol with the usual Lua function signature, lua_pushcfunction it on the stack and for example store it in package.preload.

You can also pass luajit to -Dlua_version to build against LuaJIT (it will use luajit.pc then). Additionally, if you have a different Lua implementation than that but it still provides the same compliant API, you can bypass the check with -Dlua_version=custom and then provide the appropriate include path and linkage via CXXFLAGS and LDFLAGS.

It is also possible to pass -Dlua_version=vendor, in which case the library will be taken from deps and the includes from deps/include. The deps directory can be either in the source root or in the directory you run meson from.

Keep in mind that on Unix-likes, it is not necessary to actually link against the Lua library. Even when using pkg-config, the build system will always remove the linkage. The Lua symbols are instead supplied to the module through the executable it's loaded from. This does not work on Windows, where you actually need to link against the DLL for Lua modules to work.

When using homebrew on macOS, its libffi is not installed globally. Therefore, you will need to set your PKG_CONFIG_PATH so that pkg-config can find its .pc file.

You can also use -Dlibffi=custom if you have a system that does not provide a .pc file for libffi. In that case you will need to provide the right include path in CXXFLAGS so that either <ffi.h> or <ffi/ffi.h> can be included, plus linkage in LDFLAGS.

It is also possible to pass -Dlua_install_path=... to override where the Lua module will be installed. See below for that.

The shared_libffi option will make libffi provide dllimport-decorated APIs on Windows; for Lua this is the default as there is always a DLL. On other systems, it does nothing. This is not strictly necessary, but it will make things faster when you're really using dynamic versions of those, and it's not possible to autodetect. Usually, you should be using static libffi on Windows.

Windows and MSVC style environment

To build on Windows with an MSVC-style toolchain, first get yourself a binary distribution of libffi and the right version of Lua. They must be compatible with the runtime you're targeting.

Drop the .lib files (import lib for Lua, static lib for libffi, unless you link libffi dynamically) of libffi and lua in the deps directory (either in the source root or the directory you are running meson from). The naming is up to you, meson will accept library names with or without lib prefix, and the build system accepts both unversioned and versioned to cover all environments. Usually, for Lua you will have something like lua53.lib. Also, drop the include files for libffi (ffi.h and ffitarget.h) into deps/include, same with the Lua include files.

It is recommended that you always use a static library for libffi.

Drop any .dll files in the deps directory also. This would be the Lua dll file typically (e.g. lua53.dll).

If you wish to run tests, also drop in the Lua executable, following the same naming scheme as the .dll file (or simply called lua.exe). If you don't do that, you will need to pass -Dtests=false to meson as well.

Afterwards, run meson from the build directory (create it), like this:

meson .. -Dlua_version=vendor -Dlibffi=vendor

Then proceed with the usual:

ninja all
ninja test

Examples of such environment are the Visual Studio environment itself and also Clang for Windows by default.

Windows and MinGW/MSYS style environment

This environment is Unix-like, so install the necessary dependencies as you would on Linux. In an MSYS2 environment, this would be something like:

pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc mingw-w64-x86_64-pkg-config
pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-meson
pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-libffi mingw-w64-x86_64-lua

Particularly for MSYS2, you should use dependencies from just one repo, as e.g. meson installed from the MSYS2 repo won't detect mingw-w64 libraries and so on.

After that, proceed as you would on Linux, except use shared_libffi appropriately. By default, libffi is shared in the MSYS2 environment.

meson .. -Dlua_version=5.3 -Dshared_libffi=true

You might also want to provide -static-libgcc -static-libstdc++ in LDFLAGS if you wish to distribute the resulting module/library, otherwise they will carry dependencies the libgcc and libstdc++-6 DLLs.

Compile and test with:

ninja all
ninja test

If you have just a plain MinGW compiler and no package manager environment with it, you will need to set it up manually and use vendor or custom for lua_version and libffi. Keep in mind that you don't need import libraries for the MinGW compiler, you can link against DLLs directly.

Installing

$ ninja install

This will install either the module or the static library depending on how you have configured the build.

By default, the Lua module will install in $(libdir)/lua/$(luaver), e.g. /usr/lib/lua/5.2. This is the default for most Lua installations. You can override that with -Dlua_install_path=.... The path is the entire installation path. You can insert @0@ in it, which will be replaced with the Lua version you're building for (e.g. 5.2). No other substitutions are performed.

The goal of this is to make sure the module will be installed in a location contained in your Lua's package.cpath.

Testing

The module uses a native Lua executable to run tests. Since by default tests are enabled, the build system will search for the executable. If your copy of Lua is in a non-standard path, you can use -Dlua_path=... when configuring to explicitly specify where the executable is stored.

Tests are only runnable when all of the following is met:

• You are not cross-compiling
• You are doing a module build (i.e. not -Dstatic=true)
• The Lua executable matches the language version you are building for

Either way, you can run tests with the following:

$ ninja test

You can see the available test cases in tests, they also serve as examples.

Some of the tests only work if cffi is built with working cffi.load. This is nearly always true when you are building a module, since cffi supports more targets than Lua itself with module loading.

You can also run the individual test cases standalone, like this:

$ lua path/to/cffi/tests/runner.lua path/to/test/case.lua

The environment variable TESTS_PATH can be used to manually specify the tests directory. Usually this is not necessary as it's automatically figured out.

You can also specify CFFI_PATH as the path where cffi.so or .dll is stored. By default, it is assumed default package.cpath contains it somewhere.

Additionally, TESTLIB_PATH should be specified as a path to the test support library. This library contains utilities used by some of the tests, like various native calls and global symbols. By default, it is stored in build/tests. If you do not specify this, tests requiring it will not run.

Test cases ordinarily do not print anything to standard output or error. If the return code is 0, the test has succeeded. If it is 77, the test was skipped, e.g. because of the testlib not being found. In case of hard failures, an assertion error will be raised.