node-ffi-napi/node-ffi-napi

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1097 stars · 155 forks observed · 2026-08-28

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

node-ffi-napi is a Node.js addon providing a foreign function interface (FFI) for loading and calling dynamic native libraries from pure JavaScript, without writing C++ binding code. It handles type translation between JavaScript and C and bundles libffi.

Use cases

• call functions from a C shared library in Node.js
• create Node.js bindings to a native library without writing C++
• invoke libc functions like atoi from JavaScript
• wrap an existing .so/.dll/.dylib for Node.js use
• prototype native code interop from pure JavaScript

When to choose

• you need to call a native dynamic library from Node.js quickly without writing a C++ addon
• you want to avoid node-gyp boilerplate for simple native function calls
• you need cross-platform FFI on Linux, macOS, or Windows

When to avoid

• your native code is multi-threaded or relies on well-defined garbage-collection semantics
• you need long-term maintained support - the project is in maintenance mode and newer alternatives like koffi or node-API addons exist
• you cannot tolerate potential segfaults from incorrect type or pointer usage

Facets

library · maturity maintenance

sdk developer-tools developer-tools cross-platform windows cross-platform ffi napi native-bindings dynamic-libraries libffi nodejs-addon nodejs linux macos

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