Awesome
About
This is a library for calling C function and manipulating C types from lua. It is designed to be interface compatible with the FFI library in LuaJIT (see http://luajit.org/ext_ffi.html). 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 is a fork of https://github.com/jmckaskill/luaffi
Source
https://github.com/facebook/luaffifb
Platforms
Currently supported:
- Linux x86/x64
- OS X x86/x64
Runs with Lua 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3
Build
In a terminal:
git clone https://github.com/facebook/luaffifb
cd luaffifb
luarocks make
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:
- Calls the needed unpack functions in
ffi.C
placing each argument on the HW stack - Updates
errno
- Performs the C call
- Retrieves
errno
- Pushes the result back into lua from the HW register or stack