libffi/libffi

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_license

Adoption not part of the score

4394 stars · 838 forks observed · 2026-10-20

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

libffi is a portable C library providing a high-level interface to various calling conventions, allowing code to call compiled functions whose signatures are only known at runtime. It is the machine-dependent foundation layer used by projects like CPython's ctypes and OpenJDK to bridge interpreted and native code.

Use cases

• call native C functions at runtime with dynamically determined signatures
• build a bridge between an interpreter and compiled code
• implement ctypes-style foreign function interface bindings
• invoke functions with unknown argument types in a scripting language runtime
• port a language runtime to multiple CPU architectures and ABIs

When to choose

• you need runtime function calls into native code without compile-time signatures
• you are building an interpreter, VM, or FFI binding layer
• you need broad architecture and OS portability for calling conventions

When to avoid

• you can bind functions statically at compile time
• you need high-level type marshalling between languages (libffi only provides the low layer)
• you need a pure-language solution without native dependencies

Facets

library · maturity stable

interpreter compiler developer-tools programming-languages developer-tools cross-platform windows cross-platform cpp c ffi foreign-function-interface calling-conventions c-library runtime interop linux macos

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