Generate binary interface specification from C declaration

Question

I'm implementing foreign function interface for my toy language. Instead of writing compatible declarations manually, I want to reuse C header files provided by operating systems.

How can I get binary interface (such as types of function parameters, memory layout of a structures, type alignments, optimization hints) for a specific platform from C header files? Is there any way to use Clang or GCC to do that?

Answer 1

Use -dump option of the abi-compliance-checker tool. It will create the ABI dump of the input header files. Add -xml option to produce XML output.

In your case you need the following input XML descriptor (descriptor.xml):

 <version>
     1.0 /* any version */
 </version>

 <headers>
     /path1/to/headers
     /path2/to/headers
     ...
 </headers>

The command to run the tool:

abi-compliance-checker -l ANY_NAME -dump descriptor.xml -headers-only

The additional -headers-only option in the command is needed if you have not specified any shared libraries in the descriptor (in the <libs>...</libs> section of the XML descriptor).