# IronRuby FFI **URL:** \ **Category:** IronRuby\ **Created:** [August 20, 2010, 9:44pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ironruby-ffi/193637 "2010-08-20T21:44:50Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 17\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![ryan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/a8b319/32.png) [@ryan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/ryan)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2010, 9:44pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ironruby-ffi/193637/1 "2010-08-20T21:44:50Z")
I know that we’ve discussed this in the past, but I’m interested in doing it for two reasons: 1. We use mono with a bridge to ObjectiveC and Cocoa, and we’d like to investigate libffi via mono as a potential replacement for our current bridge. 2. I’m interested just for the sake of learning more about FFI. Mono appears to have had a libffi implementation that was later removed, so I think I have a place to start. However, I’m not sure that’s the right starting point. Does anyone have a suggestion for how to get started? I’ve been taking a look at libffi and DllImport, but I’m not sure if those are the right directions, something else, or what. Thanks, Ryan R. Email: removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid LinkedIn: [http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanriley](http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanriley) Twitter: @panesofglass Blog: [http://wizardsofsmart.net/](http://wizardsofsmart.net/) Website: [http://panesofglass.org/](http://panesofglass.org/) ---
**Author:** ![ryan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/a8b319/32.png) [@ryan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/ryan)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2010, 11:06pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ironruby-ffi/193637/2 "2010-08-20T23:06:12Z")
Ryan, I’m right there with you, only I looked at JFFI for inspiration (didn’t know mono had anything - could you share more about that?). In fact, In my infinite laziness, I posted a job for a couple hundred bucks on Rent-A-Coder, hoping someone could essentially port JFFI to C#, so I could focus on writing the actually IronRuby library… but nothing came of that. I’m tempted to suck it up and start coding this myself. Would you be interested in working together? I figured I’d take the approach of essentially writing “NFFI”, and then write an IronRuby lib around that. -Charles ---
**Author:** ![ryan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/a8b319/32.png) [@ryan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/ryan)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2010, 11:14pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ironruby-ffi/193637/3 "2010-08-20T23:14:59Z")
Couldn’t this be implemented via P/Invoke? Would P/Invoke work without the attributes required in C#? – Will G. [http://hotgazpacho.org/](http://hotgazpacho.org/) On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 4:49 PM, Charles S. \< ---
**Author:** ![ryan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/a8b319/32.png) [@ryan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/ryan)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2010, 11:45pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ironruby-ffi/193637/4 "2010-08-20T23:45:26Z")
That’s something I’m curious about too. I don’t know whether or not P/Invoke alone can match the functionality of libffi. I’d have to look through some of libffi and see if there’s anything can’t be accomplished in C#. If everything can be accomplished in C#, I’d go that route. We could emit types at runtime that have the necessary DLLImport attributes and such (something I’ve already done for little projects of mine). -Charles ---
**Author:** ![ryan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/a8b319/32.png) [@ryan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/ryan)\ **Post date:** [August 21, 2010, 6:25am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ironruby-ffi/193637/5 "2010-08-21T06:25:13Z")
I’ll have to take a look at that. If it’s cross platform, it could be a great resource. -Charles On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 4:57 PM, Tomas M. \< ---
**Author:** ![ryan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/a8b319/32.png) [@ryan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/ryan)\ **Post date:** [August 22, 2010, 4:24am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ironruby-ffi/193637/6 "2010-08-22T04:24:25Z")
Charles, I’m happy to work with you to get this done. I’m getting close to finishing some projects and will have more time to work on it in a few weeks. I will send the info I got from the mono-devel list. Where/how do you want to start? Ryan Sent from my iPhone ---
**Author:** ![ryan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/a8b319/32.png) [@ryan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/ryan)\ **Post date:** [August 21, 2010, 12:25am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ironruby-ffi/193637/7 "2010-08-21T00:25:50Z")
I would also recommend to look at Python’s c-types and especially IronPython’s implementation: [http://github.com/ironruby/ironruby/tree/master/Languages/IronPython/IronPython.Modules/\_ctypes/](http://github.com/ironruby/ironruby/tree/master/Languages/IronPython/IronPython.Modules/_ctypes/) Many of the features might be similar to Ruby’s FFI and it would be good to share the implementation with IronPython when possible. Tomas From: removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid [[mailto:removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid)] On Behalf Of Charles Strahan Sent: Friday, August 20, 2010 2:35 PM To: removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid Subject: Re: [Ironruby-core] IronRuby FFI That’s something I’m curious about too. I don’t know whether or not P/Invoke alone can match the functionality of libffi. I’d have to look through some of libffi and see if there’s anything can’t be accomplished in C#. If everything can be accomplished in C#, I’d go that route. We could emit types at runtime that have the necessary DLLImport attributes and such (something I’ve already done for little projects of mine). -Charles On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 4:14 PM, Will G. \ wrote: Couldn’t this be implemented via P/Invoke? Would P/Invoke work without the attributes required in C#? – Will G. [http://hotgazpacho.org/](http://hotgazpacho.org/) On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 4:49 PM, Charles S. \ wrote: Ryan, I’m right there with you, only I looked at JFFI for inspiration (didn’t know mono had anything - could you share more about that?). In fact, In my infinite laziness, I posted a job for a couple hundred bucks on Rent-A-Coder, hoping someone could essentially port JFFI to C#, so I could focus on writing the actually IronRuby library… but nothing came of that. I’m tempted to suck it up and start coding this myself. Would you be interested in working together? I figured I’d take the approach of essentially writing “NFFI”, and then write an IronRuby lib around that. -Charles On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 2:33 PM, Ryan R. \ wrote: I know that we’ve discussed this in the past, but I’m interested in doing it for two reasons: 1. We use mono with a bridge to ObjectiveC and Cocoa, and we’d like to investigate libffi via mono as a potential replacement for our current bridge. 2. I’m interested just for the sake of learning more about FFI. Mono appears to have had a libffi implementation that was later removed, so I think I have a place to start. However, I’m not sure that’s the right starting point. Does anyone have a suggestion for how to get started? I’ve been taking a look at libffi and DllImport, but I’m not sure if those are the right directions, something else, or what. Thanks, Ryan R. Email: removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid[mailto:removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) LinkedIn: [http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanriley](http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanriley) Twitter: @panesofglass Blog: [http://wizardsofsmart.net/](http://wizardsofsmart.net/) Website: [http://panesofglass.org/](http://panesofglass.org/) * * * Ironruby-core mailing list removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid[mailto:removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) [http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core](http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core) * * * Ironruby-core mailing list removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid[mailto:removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) [http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core](http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core) ---
**Author:** ![ryan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/a8b319/32.png) [@ryan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/ryan)\ **Post date:** [October 4, 2010, 5:23am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ironruby-ffi/193637/8 "2010-10-04T05:23:37Z")
Ryan, Sorry for the long delay - I meant to give it some thought before I got back to you… and know it’s been quite some time. I think it would be a good idea to replicate JFFI, using P/Invoke directly, if possible (as opposed to P/Invoking libffi [http://www.cygwin.org/libffi/](http://www.cygwin.org/libffi/)). That would give us a good separation of concerns and a reusable library, and possibly an easy way to port any Java/JRuby code that uses JFFI to C#/.NET too. I’m about to set up an NFFI repo at [http://github.com/cstrahan/nffi](http://github.com/cstrahan/nffi). - I suppose you could fork it and send me pull requests (unless you have a better workflow in mind - I’m definitely not a git guru). I’ve been learning C/C++ the last couple months, so I should be able to write simple DLL to run our tests against. I think I’ll take a TDD approach to driving out the C# lib. Once we have NFFI working, it should be relatively straightforward to expose that to the IronRuby runtime. I’ll try to get something pushed out to my repo by the end of tomorrow - I’ll keep you in the loop. That’s what I have in mind, but I’m open to suggestions. -Charles ---
**Author:** ![ryan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/a8b319/32.png) [@ryan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/ryan)\ **Post date:** [October 4, 2010, 5:58am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ironruby-ffi/193637/9 "2010-10-04T05:58:44Z")
Sounds good to me! Sent from my iPhone ---
**Author:** ![ryan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/a8b319/32.png) [@ryan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/ryan)\ **Post date:** [August 22, 2010, 4:25am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ironruby-ffi/193637/10 "2010-08-22T04:25:35Z")
From the mono-devel list: On Thu, 2010-08-19 at 10:35 -0700, Ryan R. wrote: > Has anyone created or investigated Mono support for libffi? Once upon a time, Mono used libffi directly. It was removed in r724 (git SHA1 ID d0cd6059c1b2edad12eb67cb8e64b3cd187be1b1) on 2001-09-05 (and earlier). Unfortunately, the commit message is useless, but iirc the reason for removing it was because it was significantly slower than what Mono could do itself. > I’d like to contribute this to help support Ruby-FFI for IronRuby. I imagine IronRuby doesn’t require it’s own FFI, it would just use the usual .NET FFI of DllImport, no? As for supporting Ruby-FFI, perhaps you can extend the existing Mono FFI support to support Ruby? I don’t know what would be involved… - Jon Sent from my iPhone ---
**Author:** ![ryan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/a8b319/32.png) [@ryan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/ryan)\ **Post date:** [October 4, 2010, 6:42am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ironruby-ffi/193637/11 "2010-10-04T06:42:02Z")
I’m also taking a look at IronPython’s CTypes implementation, under Tomas’ advice. I’ve noticed that their MemoryHolder[http://github.com/ironruby/ironruby/blob/master/Languages/IronPython/IronPython.Modules/\_ctypes/MemoryHolder.cs](http://github.com/ironruby/ironruby/blob/master/Languages/IronPython/IronPython.Modules/_ctypes/MemoryHolder.cs)class derives from CriticalFinalizerObject[http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.runtime.constrainedexecution.criticalfinalizerobject.aspx](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.runtime.constrainedexecution.criticalfinalizerobject.aspx), which led me to the discovery of Constrained Execution Regions[http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms228973.aspx](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms228973.aspx) . I sent an inquiry to the IronPython mailing list[http://lists.ironpython.com/pipermail/users-ironpython.com/2010-October/013757.html](http://lists.ironpython.com/pipermail/users-ironpython.com/2010-October/013757.html)regarding the use CFO, and about CER in general, as I haven’t had any exposure to either, and the MSDN docs are a little daunting. If anyone here would like to give an explanation of either one, that would be awesome. Any experience with either of those, Ryan? -Charles ---
**Author:** ![ryan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/a8b319/32.png) [@ryan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/ryan)\ **Post date:** [October 4, 2010, 7:35am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ironruby-ffi/193637/12 "2010-10-04T07:35:16Z")
I’ve decided to not be lazy and do a little spelunking into CER’s - it’s rather interesting stuff. I found a pretty good article here: > **[Using the Reliability Features of the .NET Framework](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2005/october/using-the-reliability-features-of-the-net-framework)** In laymen’s terms, it looks like CER’s provide reliability where asynchronous exceptions may be thrown: OutOfMemoryException, StackOverflowException, and ThreadAbortException. In the case of MemoryHolder, this is important because such exceptions could preempt the storage of IntPtrs corresponding to allocated memory and/or the deallocation of memory within finalizers - both resulting in memory leaks. As I imagined, this will be something we’ll want to incorporate in our FFI impl. [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163716.aspx](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163716.aspx)-Charles ---
**Author:** ![ryan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/a8b319/32.png) [@ryan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/ryan)\ **Post date:** [October 4, 2010, 6:59am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ironruby-ffi/193637/13 "2010-10-04T06:59:00Z")
I’ve not heard of any of those. I started looking at ctypes but never got far. Sent from my iPhone ---
**Author:** ![ryan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/a8b319/32.png) [@ryan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/ryan)\ **Post date:** [October 4, 2010, 9:04am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ironruby-ffi/193637/14 "2010-10-04T09:04:12Z")
Here’s Dino Viehland’s response regarding the CERs: ```auto Objects which inherit from CriticalFinalizerObject basically have their finalize method turned into a CER. The finalizer method is also JITed before any instances are created so the finalizer is guaranteed to be runnable. In generally CERs are all about ensuring that the VM won’t cause any unexpected failure points in your code. These can be introduced because the VM does something lazily (including JITing methods) and doing the work might fail due to insufficient resources. Or it can also be due to thread abort. Because these objects are responsible for freeing up resources we don’t want any unexpected failures to be injected otherwise the resources would leak. So for example MemoryHolder also has a CER in the constructor – this ensures that we don’t take a ThreadAbort between the CallocCall, storing the value in _data, or assigning to _ownsData. This will all complete or not complete so that our state is consistent when the finalizer is run. It also makes sure that any work the CLR needs to perform to call NativeFunctions.Calloc is all performed before we enter the CER so that we don’t get an out of memory exception while calling or returning from it. For most environments it’s not super important that this is gotten right – but if you run in a process which needs long uptime, is resource constrained, and/or uses thread abort a lot (SQL server being an example of all 3) it’s important that this is correct. I happened to work on this feature when I was on the CLR team so it came rather naturally to me to get it right J ``` -Charles On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 12:11 AM, Charles S. \< ---
**Author:** ![ryan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/a8b319/32.png) [@ryan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/ryan)\ **Post date:** [October 23, 2010, 7:50pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ironruby-ffi/193637/15 "2010-10-23T19:50:36Z")
@Charles Have you made any progress here? If so, what’s your repo? I’m looking into this again this morning. Cheers, Ryan R. Email: removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid LinkedIn: [http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanriley](http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanriley) Twitter: @panesofglass Blog: [http://wizardsofsmart.net/](http://wizardsofsmart.net/) Website: [http://panesofglass.org/](http://panesofglass.org/) On Sun, Oct 3, 2010 at 11:47 PM, Charles S. \< ---
**Author:** ![ryan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/a8b319/32.png) [@ryan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/ryan)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2010, 7:57am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ironruby-ffi/193637/16 "2010-12-13T07:57:19Z")
Charles, Have you made any progress with FFI? I have finally finished with all of my craziness. Of course, the holidays are approaching, but I would love to investigate this further in the new year. ~ Ryan From: removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid [[mailto:removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid)] On Behalf Of Charles Strahan Sent: Sunday, October 03, 2010 11:47 PM To: removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid Subject: Re: [Ironruby-core] IronRuby FFI Here’s Dino Viehland’s response regarding the CERs: ```auto Objects which inherit from CriticalFinalizerObject basically have their finalize method turned into a CER. The finalizer method is also JITed before any instances are created so the finalizer is guaranteed to be runnable. In generally CERs are all about ensuring that the VM won't cause any unexpected failure points in your code. These can be introduced because the VM does something lazily (including JITing methods) and doing the work might fail due to insufficient resources. Or it can also be due to thread abort. Because these objects are responsible for freeing up resources we don't want any unexpected failures to be injected otherwise the resources would leak. So for example MemoryHolder also has a CER in the constructor - this ensures that we don't take a ThreadAbort between the CallocCall, storing the value in _data, or assigning to _ownsData. This will all complete or not complete so that our state is consistent when the finalizer is run. It also makes sure that any work the CLR needs to perform to call NativeFunctions.Calloc is all performed before we enter the CER so that we don't get an out of memory exception while calling or returning from it. For most environments it's not super important that this is gotten right - but if you run in a process which needs long uptime, is resource constrained, and/or uses thread abort a lot (SQL server being an example of all 3) it's important that this is correct. I happened to work on this feature when I was on the CLR team so it came rather naturally to me to get it right J ``` -Charles On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 12:11 AM, Charles S. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: I’ve decided to not be lazy and do a little spelunking into CER’s - it’s rather interesting stuff. I found a pretty good article here: > **[Using the Reliability Features of the .NET Framework](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2005/october/using-the-reliability-features-of-the-net-framework)** In laymen’s terms, it looks like CER’s provide reliability where asynchronous exceptions may be thrown: OutOfMemoryException, StackOverflowException, and ThreadAbortException. In the case of MemoryHolder, this is important because such exceptions could preempt the storage of IntPtrs corresponding to allocated memory and/or the deallocation of memory within finalizers - both resulting in memory leaks. As I imagined, this will be something we’ll want to incorporate in our FFI impl. -Charles On Sun, Oct 3, 2010 at 11:51 PM, Ryan R. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: I’ve not heard of any of those. I started looking at ctypes but never got far. Sent from my iPhone On Oct 3, 2010, at 9:27 PM, Charles S. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: I’m also taking a look at IronPython’s CTypes implementation, under Tomas’ advice. I’ve noticed that their MemoryHolder \<[http://github.com/ironruby/ironruby/blob/master/Languages/IronPython/IronPy](http://github.com/ironruby/ironruby/blob/master/Languages/IronPython/IronPy) thon.Modules/\_ctypes/MemoryHolder.cs\> class derives from CriticalFinalizerObject \<[System.Runtime.ConstrainedExecution Namespace | Microsoft Learn](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.runtime.constrainedexecution) .criticalfinalizerobject.aspx\> , which led me to the discovery of Constrained Execution Regions [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms228973.aspx](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms228973.aspx) . I sent an inquiry to the IronPython mailing list \<[http://lists.ironpython.com/pipermail/users-ironpython.com/2010-October/013](http://lists.ironpython.com/pipermail/users-ironpython.com/2010-October/013) 757.html\> regarding the use CFO, and about CER in general, as I haven’t had any exposure to either, and the MSDN docs are a little daunting. If anyone here would like to give an explanation of either one, that would be awesome. Any experience with either of those, Ryan? -Charles On Sun, Oct 3, 2010 at 10:39 PM, Ryan R. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: Sounds good to me! Sent from my iPhone On Oct 3, 2010, at 8:04 PM, Charles S. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: Ryan, Sorry for the long delay - I meant to give it some thought before I got back to you… and know it’s been quite some time. I think it would be a good idea to replicate JFFI, using P/Invoke directly, if possible (as opposed to P/Invoking libffi [http://www.cygwin.org/libffi/](http://www.cygwin.org/libffi/) ). That would give us a good separation of concerns and a reusable library, and possibly an easy way to port any Java/JRuby code that uses JFFI to C#/.NET too. I’m about to set up an NFFI repo at [http://github.com/cstrahan/nffi](http://github.com/cstrahan/nffi). - I suppose you could fork it and send me pull requests (unless you have a better workflow in mind - I’m definitely not a git guru). I’ve been learning C/C++ the last couple months, so I should be able to write simple DLL to run our tests against. I think I’ll take a TDD approach to driving out the C# lib. Once we have NFFI working, it should be relatively straightforward to expose that to the IronRuby runtime. I’ll try to get something pushed out to my repo by the end of tomorrow - I’ll keep you in the loop. That’s what I have in mind, but I’m open to suggestions. -Charles On Sat, Aug 21, 2010 at 9:23 PM, Ryan R. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: Charles, I’m happy to work with you to get this done. I’m getting close to finishing some projects and will have more time to work on it in a few weeks. I will send the info I got from the mono-devel list. Where/how do you want to start? Ryan Sent from my iPhone On Aug 20, 2010, at 1:49 PM, Charles S. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: Ryan, I’m right there with you, only I looked at JFFI for inspiration (didn’t know mono had anything - could you share more about that?). In fact, In my infinite laziness, I posted a job for a couple hundred bucks on Rent-A-Coder, hoping someone could essentially port JFFI to C#, so I could focus on writing the actually IronRuby library… but nothing came of that. I’m tempted to suck it up and start coding this myself. Would you be interested in working together? I figured I’d take the approach of essentially writing “NFFI”, and then write an IronRuby lib around that. -Charles On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 2:33 PM, Ryan R. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: I know that we’ve discussed this in the past, but I’m interested in doing it for two reasons: 1. We use mono with a bridge to ObjectiveC and Cocoa, and we’d like to investigate libffi via mono as a potential replacement for our current bridge. 2. I’m interested just for the sake of learning more about FFI. Mono appears to have had a libffi implementation that was later removed, so I think I have a place to start. However, I’m not sure that’s the right starting point. Does anyone have a suggestion for how to get started? I’ve been taking a look at libffi and DllImport, but I’m not sure if those are the right directions, something else, or what. Thanks, Ryan R. Email: removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid LinkedIn: [http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanriley](http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanriley) Twitter: @panesofglass Blog: [http://wizardsofsmart.net/](http://wizardsofsmart.net/) Website: [http://panesofglass.org/](http://panesofglass.org/) * * * Ironruby-core mailing list removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid [http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core](http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core) * * * Ironruby-core mailing list removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid [http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core](http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core) * * * Ironruby-core mailing list removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid [http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core](http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core) * * * Ironruby-core mailing list removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid [http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core](http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core) * * * Ironruby-core mailing list removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid [http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core](http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core) * * * Ironruby-core mailing list removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid [http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core](http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core) ---
**Author:** ![ryan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/a8b319/32.png) [@ryan](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/ryan)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2010, 5:59am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ironruby-ffi/193637/17 "2010-12-14T05:59:10Z")
Ryan, Have you made any progress with FFI? I have finally finished with all of my > craziness. Of course, the holidays are approaching, but I would love to > investigate this further in the new year. I haven’t written any code yet (I’ve been rather swamped lately). I took a look at the API ([RubyDoc.info: File: README – Documentation for ffi/ffi (master) – RubyDoc.info](http://rdoc.info/github/ffi/ffi)) that we’d have to provide for a full implementation, and it looks rather daunting. I’m still reading through JFFI, JRuby and RubyFFI trying to wrap my head around all of it. I’m not sure how I would get started right now. However, I’m going to spend some time the next couple days trying to figure out how I might attack this. I’ll be sure to keep this thread up-to-date with my thoughts/feelings on this. Feel free to take the lead if you have a clearer vision of how this needs to get done; otherwise, I’ll update you on Tuesday or Wednesday. Cheers, -Charles