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fastFFI: Modern and Efficient FFI for Java and C++

Basically, fastFFI has three components:

  • FFI: DSL and API used to develop FFI applications.
  • Annotation Processor: the code generator for FFI.
  • LLVM4JNI: LLVM4JNI has two submodules:
    • LLVM4JNI: a tool that translates LLVM bitcode into Java bytecode.
    • LLVM4JNI Runtime: the runtime component used by generated bytecode.

An FFI application must include ffi and llvm4jni-runtime in its class path as runtime dependency.

Build

  1. Checkout source code

    git clone <path-to-fastffi> fastffi

  2. Prepare building environment

    export LLVM11_HOME=<path-to-llvm-11>

    LLVM11_HOME should point to the home of LLVM 11. In Ubuntu, it is at /usr/lib/llvm-11. Basically, the build procedure the following binary:

    • $LLVM11_HOME/bin/clang++
    • $LLVM11_HOME/bin/ld.lld
    • $LLVM11_HOME/lib/cmake/llvm

  3. Use fastFFI with Maven.

    <properties>
    <fastffi.revision>0.1.2</fastffi.revision>
</properties>

<dependencies>
    <!-- The FFI annotation -->
    <dependency>
        <groupId>com.alibaba.fastffi</groupId>
        <artifactId>ffi</artifactId>
        <version>${fastffi.revision}</version>
    </dependency>
    <!-- The FFI annotation processor for code generation -->
    <dependency>
        <groupId>com.alibaba.fastffi</groupId>
        <artifactId>annotation-processor</artifactId>
        <version>${fastffi.revision}</version>
    </dependency>

    <!-- The runtime component of LLVM4JNI -->
    <dependency>
        <groupId>com.alibaba.fastffi</groupId>
        <artifactId>llvm4jni</artifactId>
        <version>${fastffi.revision}</version>
        <classifier>${os.detected.classifier}</classifier>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>com.alibaba.fastffi</groupId>
        <artifactId>llvm4jni-runtime</artifactId>
        <version>${fastffi.revision}</version>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>

<plugins>
    <plugin>
        <groupId>kr.motd.maven</groupId>
        <artifactId>os-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>1.7.0</version>
        <executions>
            <execution>
                <phase>initialize</phase>
                <goals>
                    <goal>detect</goal>
                </goals>
            </execution>
        </executions>
    </plugin>
</plugins>

  4. Use maven to build your applications.

    The generated code, including Java and C++ code, is available in <project.dir>/target/generated-source/annotations

Options

A Java programming language compiler must support standard options in the format -Akey[=value]. fastFFI provides the following options:

  1. fastffi.handleException: whether generating code to handle C++ exceptions
    • default value: false
  2. fastffi.manualBoxing: using new Integer() or new Long() to box a primitive integer.
    • default value: true
    • Auto boxing uses Integer.valueOf or Long.valueOf, which cannot be properly handled by the escape analysis of C2 compiler.
  3. fastffi.strictTypeCheck
    • default value: false
  4. fastffi.nullReturnValueCheck
    • default value: true
    • insert additional null check for native pointers
  5. fastffi.cxxOutputLocation
    • default value: CLASS_OUTPUT
    • accept values: CLASS_OUTPUT, SOURCE_OUTPUT, NATIVE_HEADER_OUTPUT.
  6. fastffi.traceJNICalls
    • default value: false
    • generate stuffs to trace the invocations of JNI wrappers
  7. fastffi.compactFFINames
    • default value: true
    • generate compact FFI wrapper type names, non-compact names will benefit debugging, but increase the binary size

Usage:

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>3.8.0</version>
    <configuration>
        <compilerVersion>${javac.target}</compilerVersion>
        <source>${javac.target}</source>
        <target>${javac.target}</target>
        <compilerArgs>
            <arg>-Afastffi.strictTypeCheck=true</arg>
        </compilerArgs>
    </configuration>
</plugin>

Build Mac OS

  1. Install a JDK (JDK 8 and 11)

  2. Install LLVM 11, Maven and CMake

    brew install llvm@11 cmake maven

  3. Set ENV

    export LLVM11_HOME=/usr/local/opt/llvm@11

FAQ

TBA