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5.7 The C language interface

Using these special forms clines and c-inline, plus the ability to handle pointers to foreign data, we have built a rather complete FFI for interfacing with the C world. This interface is compatible with the UFFI specification, which can be found in the web. We recommend you to grab the documentation from this package and read it carefully. All examples should run unmodified under ECL (Of course, you do not need to download UFFI itself, as everything is already implemented in ECL.

However, because ECL provides some additional functionality which escapes the UFFI, and also for compatibility with older versions of the ECL environment, we provide additional toplevel forms, which are listed in the next section.