The cffi package is an extension that implements a Foreign Function Interface for Tcl. It is based on the dyncall library available from https://dyncall.org .
The repository for the package is at https://github.com/apnadkarni/tcl-cffi . Current release is 1.0a5.
Documentation pages are at https://cffi.magicsplat.com .
Source distributions and binary packages for some platforms are at https://sourceforge.net/projects/magicsplat/files/cffi .
Distinguishing features of the package are
- Automatic conversion of numerics, strings, structures and arrays to and from the corresponding Tcl script values
- Safety mechanisms to protect against pointer errors like double frees, mismatched types
- Support for automatic encoding of string values passed and returned from C functions
- Exception generation based on error annotations
- Proc-like argument processing with defaults, error messages etc.
- Utilities for managing memory and conversion to native formats
- Extensible type aliases for common system definitions
- Introspection
Limitations (as of 1.0 Alpha 5) include
- No support for arrays of non-scalars
- No support of functions taking variable number of arguments
- No support for callbacks from C code
- No support for passing structs by value
See also
Driving Libzip with CFFI