coffi

Coffi is a foreign function interface library for Clojure, using the new Project Panama that's a part of the incubator in Java 17. This allows calling native code directly from Clojure without the need for either Java or native code specific to the library, as e.g. the JNI does. Coffi focuses on ease of use, including functions and macros for creating wrappers to allow the resulting native functions to act just like Clojure ones, however this doesn't remove the ability to write systems which minimize the cost of marshaling data and optimize for performance, to make use of the low-level access Panama gives us.

Installation

This library is available on Clojars. Add the following entry to the :deps key of your deps.edn:

org.suskalo/coffi {:mvn/version "0.1.0"}

Usage

There are two major components to coffi and interacting with native code: manipulating off-heap memory, and loading native code for use with Clojure.

In the simplest cases, the native functions you call will work exclusively with built-in types, for example the function strlen from libc.

(require '[coffi.ffi :as ffi :refer [defcfn defalias]])

(defcfn strlen
  "Given a string, measures its length in bytes."
  strlen [::ffi/c-string] ::ffi/long)

(strlen "hello")
;; => 5

The first argument to defcfn is the name of the Clojure var that will hold the native function reference, followed by an optional docstring and attribute map, then the C function identifier, including the name of the native symbol, a vector of argument types, and the return type.

Primitive Types

Coffi defines a basic set of primitive types:

• byte
• short
• int
• long
• long-long
• char
• float
• double
• pointer

Each of these types maps to their C counterpart. Values of any of these primitive types except for pointer will be cast with their corresponding Clojure function (with long-long mapping to the long function) when they are passed as arguments to native functions. Additionally, the c-string type is defined, although it is not primitive.

Composite Types

In addition, some composite types are also defined in coffi, including struct and union types (unions will be discussed with serialization and deserialization). For an example c struct and function:

typedef struct point {
    float x;
    float y;
} Point;

Point zero(void) {
    Point res = {};

    res.x = 0.0;
    res.y = 0.0;

    return res;
}

The corresponding coffi definition is like so:

(defcfn zero-point
  "zero" [] [::ffi/struct [[:x ::ffi/float] [:y ::ffi/float]]])

(zero-point)
;; => {:x 0.0,
;;     :y 0.0}

Writing out struct definitions like this every time would get tedious, so the macro defalias is used to define a struct alias.

(defalias ::point
  [::ffi/struct
   [[:x ::ffi/float]
    [:y ::ffi/float]]])

(defcfn zero-point
  "zero" [] ::point)

In cases where a pointer to some data is required to pass as an argument to a native function, but dosn't need to be read back in, the pointer primitive type can take a type argument.

[::ffi/pointer ::ffi/int]

Arrays are also supported via a type argument. Keep in mind that they are the array itself, and not a pointer to the array like you might see in certain cases in C.

[::ffi/array ::ffi/int 3]

Callbacks

In addition to these composite types, there is also support for Clojure functions.

[::ffi/fn [::ffi/c-string] ::ffi/int]

Be aware though that if an exception is thrown out of a callback that is called from C, the JVM will crash. The resulting crash log should include the exception type and message in the registers section, but it's important to be aware of all the same. Ideally you should test your callbacks before actually passing them to native code.

Variadic Functions

Some native functions can take any number of arguments, and in these cases coffi provides vacfn-factory (for "varargs C function factory").

(def printf-factory (vacfn-factory "printf" [::ffi/c-string] ::ffi/int))

This returns a function of the types of the rest of the arguments which itself returns a native function wrapper.

(def print-int (printf-factory ::ffi/int))

(print-int "Some integer: %d\n" 5)
;; Some integer: 5

At the moment there is no equivalent to defcfn for varargs functions.

Some native functions that are variadic use the type va_list to make it easier for other languages to call them in their FFI. At the time of writing, coffi does not support va-list, however it is a planned feature.

TODO Global Variables

TODO Complex Wrappers

TODO Serialization and Deserialization

TODO Data Model

License

Copyright © 2021 Joshua Suskalo

Distributed under the Eclipse Public License version 1.0.