Data pointers#

How pointers are used#

In C, pointer arguments are used for differenty purposes. It is important to distinguish these use cases because Koffi provides different ways to deal with each of them:

  • Struct pointers: Use of struct pointers by C libraries fall in two cases: avoid (potentially) expensive copies, and to let the function change struct contents (output or input/output arguments).

  • Opaque pointers: the library does not expose the contents of the structs, and only provides you with a pointer to it (e.g. FILE *). Only the functions provided by the library can do something with this pointer, in Koffi we call this an opaque type. This is usually done for ABI-stability reason, and to prevent library users from messing directly with library internals.

  • Pointers to primitive types: This is more rare, and generally used for output or input/output arguments. The Win32 API has a lot of these.

  • Arrays: in C, you dynamically-sized arrays are usually passed to functions with pointers, either NULL-terminated (or any other sentinel value) or with an additional length argument.

Pointer types#

Struct pointers#

The following Win32 example uses GetCursorPos() (with an output parameter) to retrieve and show the current cursor position.

 1const koffi = require('koffi');
 2const lib = koffi.load('kernel32.dll');
 3
 4// Type declarations
 5const POINT = koffi.struct('POINT', {
 6    x: 'long',
 7    y: 'long'
 8});
 9
10// Functions declarations
11const GetCursorPos = lib.func('int __stdcall GetCursorPos(_Out_ POINT *pos)');
12
13// Get and show cursor position
14let pos = {};
15if (!GetCursorPos(pos))
16    throw new Error('Failed to get cursor position');
17console.log(pos);

Opaque pointers#

New in Koffi 2.0

Some C libraries use handles, which behave as pointers to opaque structs. An example of this is the HANDLE type in the Win32 API. If you want to reproduce this behavior, you can define a named pointer type to an opaque type, like so:

1const HANDLE = koffi.pointer('HANDLE', koffi.opaque());
2
3// And now you get to use it this way:
4const GetHandleInformation = lib.func('bool __stdcall GetHandleInformation(HANDLE h, _Out_ uint32_t *flags)');
5const CloseHandle = lib.func('bool __stdcall CloseHandle(HANDLE h)');

Pointer to primitive types#

In javascript, it is not possible to pass a primitive value by reference to another function. This means that you cannot call a function and expect it to modify the value of one of its number or string parameter.

However, arrays and objects (among others) are reference type values. Assigning an array or an object from one variable to another does not invole any copy. Instead, as the following example illustrates, the new variable references the same array as the first:

1let list1 = [1, 2];
2let list2 = list1;
3
4list2[1] = 42;
5
6console.log(list1); // Prints [1, 42]

All of this means that C functions that are expected to modify their primitive output values (such as an int * parameter) cannot be used directly. However, thanks to Koffi’s transparent array support, you can use Javascript arrays to approximate reference semantics with single-element arrays.

Below, you can find an example of an addition function where the result is stored in an int * input/output parameter and how to use this function from Koffi.

1void AddInt(int *dest, int add)
2{
3    *dest += add;
4}

You can simply pass a single-element array as the first argument:

1const AddInt = lib.func('void AddInt(_Inout_ int *dest, int add)');
2
3let sum = [36];
4AddInt(sum, 6);
5
6console.log(sum[0]); // Prints 42

Array pointers (dynamic arrays)#

In C, dynamically-sized arrays are usually passed around as pointers. The length is either passed as an additional argument, or inferred from the array content itself, for example with a terminating sentinel value (such as a NULL pointers in the case of an array of strings).

Koffi can translate JS arrays and TypedArrays to pointer arguments. However, because C does not have a proper notion of dynamically-sized arrays (fat pointers), you need to provide the length or the sentinel value yourself depending on the API.

Here is a simple example of a C function taking a NULL-terminated list of strings as input, to calculate the total length of all strings.

 1// Build with: clang -fPIC -o length.so -shared length.c -Wall -O2
 2
 3#include <stdlib.h>
 4#include <stdint.h>
 5#include <string.h>
 6
 7int64_t ComputeTotalLength(const char **strings)
 8{
 9    int64_t total = 0;
10
11    for (const char **ptr = strings; *ptr; ptr++) {
12        const char *str = *ptr;
13        total += strlen(str);
14    }
15
16    return total;
17}

1const koffi = require('koffi');
2const lib = koffi.load('./length.so');
3
4const ComputeTotalLength = lib.func('int64_t ComputeTotalLength(const char **strings)');
5
6let strings = ['Get', 'Total', 'Length', null];
7let total = ComputeTotalLength(strings);
8
9console.log(total); // Prints 14

By default, just like for objects, array arguments are copied from JS to C but not vice-versa. You can however change the direction as documented in the section on output parameters.

Disposable types#

Disposable types allow you to register a function that will automatically called after each C to JS conversion performed by Koffi. This can be used to avoid leaking heap-allocated strings, for example.

Read the documentation for disposable types on the page about function calls.