ffi/ffi

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases

Adoption not part of the score

2129 stars · 346 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Ruby-FFI is a Ruby gem for programmatically loading dynamically-linked native libraries, binding their functions, and calling them from Ruby code. It provides an intuitive DSL supporting C types, structs, enums, callbacks, and works unchanged across CRuby, JRuby, Rubinius, and TruffleRuby.

Use cases

• call C library functions from Ruby
• load a shared native library and bind its functions
• write Ruby extensions without C code
• pass structs and callbacks between Ruby and C
• use the Windows API from Ruby
• wrap a native C library for a Ruby gem

When to choose

• you need to call native C libraries from Ruby without writing C extension code
• you want one extension codebase that works on MRI, JRuby, and TruffleRuby
• you need callbacks, structs, enums, or pointers interop with C
• you want automatic garbage collection of native memory

When to avoid

• you need maximum performance from a hand-tuned native extension
• you only target MRI and prefer native C extensions with direct Ruby API access
• you need to bind C++ classes rather than C functions

Facets

library · maturity stable

sdk developer-tools developer-tools programming-languages cross-platform ruby windows cross-platform ffi foreign-function-interface native-libraries libffi ruby-gem c-bindings jruby truffleruby linux macos

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