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Articles tagged #ffi

From Inkscape to poppler

What's next? Well... poppler is the library Inkscape uses to import PDFs.

Cool bear's hot tip

Yes, the name comes from Futurama.

Crafting ARP packets to find a remote host's MAC address

Alright. ALRIGHT. I know, we're all excited, but let's think about what we're doing again.

So we've managed to look at real network traffic and parse it completely. We've also taken some ICMP packets, parsed them, and then serialized them right back and we got the exact same result.

Binding C APIs with variable-length structs and UTF-16

Okay, I lied.

I'm deciding - right this instant - that using wmic is cheating too. Oh, it was fair game when we were learning about Windows, but we're past that now.

A simple ping library, parsing strings into IPv4 address

We've just spent a lot of time abstracting over LoadLibrary, but we still have all the gory details of the Win32 ICMP API straight in our main.rs file! That won't do.

Designing and implementing a safer API on top of LoadLibrary

It's refactor time!

Our complete program is now about a hundred lines, counting blank lines (see the end of part 3 for a complete listing).

FFI-safe types in Rust, newtypes and MaybeUninit

It's time to make sup, our own take on ping, use the Win32 APIs to send an ICMP echo. Earlier we discovered that Windows's ping.exe used IcmpSendEcho2Ex. But for our purposes, the simpler IcmpSendEcho will do just fine.

Windows dynamic libraries, calling conventions, and transmute

So, how does ping.exe actually send a ping? It seems unrealistic that ping.exe itself implements all the protocols involved in sending a ping. So it must be calling some sort of library. Also, since it ends up talking to the outside world via a NIC (network interface controller), the kernel is probably involved at some point.

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