C Interoperability

C3 is C ABI compatible. That means you can call C from C3, and call C3 from C without having to do anything special. As a quick way to call C, you can simply declare the function as a C3 function but with extern in front of it. As long as the function is linked, it will work:

extern fn void puts(char*); // C "puts"

fn void main()
{
    // This will call the "puts"
    // function in the standard c lib.
    puts("Hello, world!"); 
}

While C3 functions are available from C using their external name, it's often useful to define an external name using @extern to match C usage.

module foo;
fn int square(int x)
{
    return x * x;
}

fn int square2(int x) @extern("square")
{
    return x * x;
}

Calling from C:

extern int square(int);
int foo_square(int) __attribute__ ((weak, alias ("foo.square")));

void test()
{
    // This would call square2
    printf("%d\n", square(11));

    // This would call square
    printf("%d\n", foo_square(11));
}

Gotchas

• Bitstructs will be seen as its underlying type from C.
• C3 cannot use C bit fields
• C assumes the enum size is CInt
• C3 uses fixed integer sizes, this means that int and CInt does not need to be the same.
• Passing arrays by value like in C3 must be represented as passing a struct containing the array.
• Atomic types are not supported by C3.
• Volatile and const have no representation in C3.