Interoperating with C using dart:ffi

Contents

• Core Concepts
• Memory Management & Finalization
• Cross-Platform Type Mapping
• Workflow: Generating Bindings with ffigen
• Workflow: Loading and Calling Native Functions
• Examples

Core Concepts

Use the dart:ffi library to call native C APIs and manage native memory in Dart applications running on the Dart Native platform.

Related Skills: Refer to dart-concurrency-isolates when executing heavy FFI workloads to avoid blocking the main thread.

Memory Management & Finalization

Manage native memory explicitly to prevent leaks.

• DO manually allocate and free memory using calloc or malloc from package:ffi when passing dynamically sized data to C.
• DO use Finalizable and NativeFinalizer to ensure native resources are automatically cleaned up when the Dart object is garbage collected.