This is a good article. I encourage anyone who writes C bindings with ctypes to study it carefully.
A little bit of advice to shorten your dune files:
(deps (:gen ./gen_constants_c.exe))
This line isn’t necessary. Dune is smart enough to know that running a binary in a rule incurs a dependency on it.
dune
has a truly amazing support for cross-compiling, which we do not cover here, but, unfortunately, its primitives for building and executing binaries do not yet cover this use case.
Indeed, we don’t have any primitives for running binaries on the target platform. Perhaps we should add some. However, we do in fact have some features in dune to solve this concrete cross compilation problem. As far as I understand, the goal is to obtain some compile time values such as #define
constants and field offsets for the target platform. This does not in fact require to run anything on the cross compilation target. In configurator, we have a primitive C_define.import
to extract this information. The end result is that these configurator scripts are completely compatible with cross compilation.
Perhaps this could be generalized to work with ctypes generators as well?
Funny bit of trivia: The hack in configurator required to do this is in fact something I extracted from ctypes itself. The original author is whitequark, who in turn wrote it to make ctypes itself amendable to cross compilation.