build.rs
💡 This is the recommended way to use bindgen
. 💡
Often times C and C++ headers will have platform- and architecture-specific #ifdef
s that affect the shape of the Rust FFI bindings we need to create to interface Rust code with the outside world. By using bindgen
as a library inside your build.rs
, you can generate bindings for the current target on-the-fly. Otherwise, you would need to generate and maintain x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu-bindings.rs
, x86_64-apple-darwin-bindings.rs
, etc... separate bindings files for each of your supported targets, which can be a huge pain. The downside is that everyone building your crate also needs libclang
available to run bindgen
.
📚 There is complete API reference documentation on docs.rs 📚
The next section contains a detailed, step-by-step tutorial for using bindgen
as a library inside build.rs
.