1 Overview

Although using the FFI requires writing no new C code, it provides very little insulation against the issues that C programmers face related to safety and memory management. An FFI programmer must be particularly aware of memory management issues for data that spans the Racket–C divide. Thus, this manual relies in many ways on the information in Inside: Racket C API, which defines how Racket interacts with C APIs in general.

Since using the FFI entails many safety concerns that Racket programmers can normally ignore, the library name includes unsafe. Importing the library macro should be considered as a declaration that your code is itself unsafe, therefore can lead to serious problems in case of bugs: it is your responsibility to provide a safe interface. If your library provides an unsafe interface, then it should have unsafe in its name, too.

For examples of common FFI usage patterns, see the defined interfaces in the "ffi" collection.