6.28 C Interface

Gforth’s C interface works by compiling a wrapper library that contains C functions which take parameters from the Forth stacks and calls the C functions. This wrapper library is compiled by the C compiler. Compilation results are cached, so that Gforth only needs to rerun the C compilation if the wrapper library has to change. This build process is automatic, and done at the end of a interface declaration. Gforth uses libtool and GCC for that process.

The C interface is now mostly complete, callbacks have been added, but for structs, we use Forth2012 structs, which don’t have independent scopes. The offsets of those structs are extracted from header files with a SWIG plugin.