Toka Tutorial: Lesson 13

Lesson 13: The Foreign Function Interface

To allow use of external libraries, Toka provides a simple Foreign Function Interface (called FFI for short). This is built around the following primitives:

  from LIBRARY

Set the import source to LIBRARY. This should be a fully-qualified filename; it may require a path as well as the .so extension.

  N import FUNCTION

Imports a function named FUNCTION from the previously loaded library. A new quote named FUNCTION will be created, and will take N arguments off the stack. The imported function will always have a return value, even for void functions.

You may want to make use of as to rename the imported function.

Example:

  #! Load libc. On Linux, this is libc.so.6, but on BSD it's libc.so

  from libc.so.6
  2 import printf as printf.2
  " %i\n" 100 printf.2

changed September 16, 2007