SWIG VS libffi

Compare SWIG vs libffi and see what are their differences.

SWIG

SWIG is a software development tool that connects programs written in C and C++ with a variety of high-level programming languages. (by swig)

libffi

A portable foreign-function interface library. (by libffi)
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SWIG libffi
25 11
5,463 3,035
1.2% 1.5%
9.8 7.9
1 day ago 10 days ago
C++ C
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

SWIG

Posts with mentions or reviews of SWIG. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-07-18.

libffi

Posts with mentions or reviews of libffi. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-02-25.
  • Error when installing .deb
    2 projects | /r/pop_os | 25 Feb 2023
    Ok, there is a missing dependency, libffi6, which cannot be installed, because it isn't at repos. You can either install it via downloading from other repos (there is a chance in the debian repo), or via compiling on your own (you can start with paying a visit to official site: https://sourceware.org/libffi/). Either way, move carefully and never forget when a dependency is missing, it may be a start of a "missing dependencies hell". And please, be caution, because you can break your system quite easily.
  • Your favorite binding?
    4 projects | /r/raylib | 16 Jan 2023
    I've been working in implementing libffi into Euphoria so we can call Raylib functions directly. Previously, Euphoria did not support passing structures by value and only occasionally could we get away with "faking" it by passing int type values directly (but not float types). Raylib is the first library I've run into that makes heavy use of passing structures by value, so it's been an interesting challenge. My original proof of concept worked well with libffi built as a shared library, so now I'm working on building libffi directly into the backend of Euphoria. Then we'll be off and running with full support for Raylib!
  • kivy-ios / initial build with toolchain keeps getting stuck here (checking for suffix of executables...) after updating macOS and xcode... any thoughts? Thanks!
    2 projects | /r/kivy | 1 Aug 2022
    The last line of output is from configure and appears to be during building of libffi recipe - apparently executing the generate-darwin-source-and-headers.py from libffi repository
  • Installing Python in Ubuntu 20.04
    2 projects | dev.to | 1 Dec 2021
    build-essential installs everything required for compiling basic software written in C and C++ in this case Python. Read more... zlib1g-devis the development package of the compression library that implements the deflate compression methods and essential in Python's installation and other installations as well. Read more... libncurses5-dev is the development package for the curses library that provides a terminal-independent screen-painting and keyboard-handling tool. Read more... libgdbm-dev is a development library for GDBM whose functionality is to store key/data pairs in a data file. Read more... libnss3-dev Read more... libssl-dev Read more... libreadline-dev Read more... libffi-dev Read more... libsqlite3-dev Read more... wget Read more... libbz2-dev Read more... In the next step we can either manually download the latest release of Python from the Python Official Release page or use wget which we have installed in previous command. To download using wget, paste the following command in the terminal to download Python in the computer.
  • buildozer -v android debug error
    4 projects | /r/kivy | 2 Nov 2021
    [INFO]: -> running basename https://github.com/libffi/libffi/archive/v3.3.tar.gz
  • Julia ❤ Python
    5 projects | dev.to | 24 Jul 2021
    If you have read my earlier posts you know I love multilingual programming. One important part of multilingual programming is how to interface one language with other. Typically this is called FFI or foreign function interface. At the lowest level often there are libraries (aka bindings) to talk across languages or across implementations of same language e.g. libffi. In my undergrad we did a group project where we created language bindings to separate algorithmic part written in python and opencv and X11 logic in c.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing SWIG and libffi you can also consider the following projects:

cffi

CppSharp - Tools and libraries to glue C/C++ APIs to high-level languages

Cython - The most widely used Python to C compiler

djinni

JavaCPP - The missing bridge between Java and native C++

JNA - Java Native Access

PyCUDA - CUDA integration for Python, plus shiny features

Duktape - Duktape - embeddable Javascript engine with a focus on portability and compact footprint

sol2 - Sol3 (sol2 v3.0) - a C++ <-> Lua API wrapper with advanced features and top notch performance - is here, and it's great! Documentation:

V8 - The official mirror of the V8 Git repository

jpype - JPype is cross language bridge to allow Python programs full access to Java class libraries.

PyJNIus - Access Java classes from Python