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State of foreign function support

December 2023

Maurizio Cimadamore

The Foreign Function & Memory API (FFM API in short) provides access to foreign functions through the Linker interface, which has been available as an incubating API since Java 16. A linker allows clients to construct downcall method handles — that is, method handles whose invocation targets a native function defined in some native library. In other words, FFM API's foreign function support is completely expressed in terms of Java code and no intermediate native code is required.

Zero-length memory segments

Before we dive into the specifics of the foreign function support, it would be useful to briefly recap some of the main concepts we have learned when exploring the foreign memory access support. The Foreign Memory Access API allows client to create and manipulate memory segments. A memory segment is a view over a memory source (either on- or off-heap) which is spatially bounded, temporally bounded and thread-confined. The guarantees ensure that dereferencing a segment that has been created by Java code is always safe, and can never result in a VM crash, or, worse, in silent memory corruption.

Now, in the case of memory segments, the above properties (spatial bounds, temporal bounds and confinement) can be known in full when the segment is created. But when we interact with native libraries we often receive raw pointers; such pointers have no spatial bounds (does a char* in C refer to one char, or a char array of a given size?), no notion of temporal bounds, nor thread-confinement. Raw addresses in the FFM API are modelled using zero-length memory segments.

To work with native zero-length memory segments, clients have several options, all of which are unsafe. First, clients can unsafely resize a zero-length memory segment by obtaining a memory segment with the same base address as the zero-length memory segment, but with the desired size, so that the resulting segment can then be accessed directly, as follows:

MemorySegment foreign = someSegment.get(ValueLayout.ADDRESS, 0); // size = 0
                                   .reinterpret(4)               // size = 4
int x = foreign.get(ValueLayout.JAVA_INT, 0);                    // ok

In some cases, a client might additionally want to assign new temporal bounds to a zero-length memory segment. This can be done using another variant of the MemorySegment::reinterpret method, which returns a new native segment with the desired size and temporal bounds:

MemorySegment foreign = null;
try (Arena arena = Arena.ofConfined()) {
      foreign = someSegment.get(ValueLayout.ADDRESS, 0)           // size = 0, scope = always alive
                           .reinterpret(4, arena, null);          // size = 4, scope = arena.scope()
      int x = foreign.get(ValueLayout.JAVA_INT, 0);               // ok
}
int x = foreign.get(ValueLayout.JAVA_INT, 0); // throws IllegalStateException

Note how the new segment behaves as if it was allocated in the provided arena: when the arena is closed, the new segment is no longer accessible.

Alternatively, if the size of the foreign segment is known statically, clients can associate a target layout with the address layout used to obtain the segment. When an access operation, or a function descriptor that is passed to a downcall method handle (see below), uses an address value layout with target layout T, the runtime will wrap any corresponding raw addresses as segments with size set to T.byteSize():

MemorySegment foreign = someSegment.get(ValueLayout.ADDRESS.withTargetLayout(JAVA_INT), 0); // size = 4
int x = foreign.get(ValueLayout.JAVA_INT, 0);                                               // ok

Which approach is taken largely depends on the information that a client has available when obtaining a memory segment wrapping a native pointer. For instance, if such pointer points to a C struct, the client might prefer to resize the segment unsafely, to match the size of the struct (so that out-of-bounds access will be detected by the API). If the size is known statically, using an address layout with the correct target layout might be preferable. In other instances, however, there will be no, or little information as to what spatial and/or temporal bounds should be associated with a given native pointer. In these cases using an unbounded address layout might be preferable.

Note: Memory segments created using MemorySegment::reinterpret, or OfAddress::withTargetLayout are completely unsafe. There is no way for the runtime to verify that the provided address indeed points to a valid memory location, or that the size and temporal bounds of the memory region pointed by the address indeed conforms to the parameters provided by the client. For these reasons, these methods are restricted method in the FFM API. The first time a restricted method is invoked, a runtime warning is generated. Developers can get rid of warnings by specifying the set of modules that are allowed to call restricted methods. This is done by specifying the option --enable-native-access=M, where M is a module name. Multiple module names can be specified in a comma-separated list, where the special name ALL-UNNAMED is used to enable restricted access for all code on the class path. If the --enable-native-access option is specified, any attempt to call restricted operations from a module not listed in the option will fail with a runtime exception.

Symbol lookups

The first ingredient of any foreign function support is a mechanism to lookup symbols in native libraries. In traditional Java/JNI, this is done via the System::loadLibrary and System::load methods. Unfortunately, these methods do not provide a way for clients to obtain the address associated with a given library symbol. For this reason, the Foreign Linker API introduces a new abstraction, namely SymbolLookup (similar in spirit to a method handle lookup), which provides capabilities to lookup named symbols; we can obtain a symbol lookup in 3 different ways:

  • SymbolLookup::libraryLookup(String, SegmentScope) — creates a symbol lookup which can be used to search symbol in a library with the given name. The provided segment scope parameter controls the library lifecycle: that is, when the scope is no longer alive, the library referred to by the lookup will also be closed;
  • SymbolLookup::loaderLookup — creates a symbol lookup which can be used to search symbols in all the libraries loaded by the caller's classloader (e.g. using System::loadLibrary or System::load)
  • Linker::defaultLookup — returns the default symbol lookup associated with a Linker instance. For instance, the default lookup of the native linker (see Linker::nativeLinker) can be used to look up platform-specific symbols in the standard C library (such as strlen, or getpid).

Once a lookup has been obtained, a client can use it to retrieve handles to library symbols (either global variables or functions) using the find(String) method, which returns an Optional<MemorySegment>. The memory segments returned by the lookup are zero-length segments, whose base address is the address of the function or variable in the library.

For instance, the following code can be used to look up the clang_getClangVersion function provided by the clang library; it does so by creating a library lookup whose lifecycle is associated to that of a confined arena.

try (Arena arena = Arena.ofConfined()) {
    SymbolLookup libclang = SymbolLookup.libraryLookup("libclang.so", arena);
    MemorySegment clangVersion = libclang.find("clang_getClangVersion").get();
}

Linker

At the core of the FFM API's foreign function support we find the Linker abstraction. This abstraction plays a dual role: first, for downcalls, it allows modelling foreign function calls as plain MethodHandle calls (see Linker::downcallHandle); second, for upcalls, it allows to convert an existing MethodHandle (which might point to some Java method) into a MemorySegment which could then be passed to foreign functions as a function pointer (see Linker::upcallStub):

interface Linker {
    MethodHandle downcallHandle(MemorySegment symbol, FunctionDescriptor function, Linker.Option... options);
    MemorySegment upcallStub(MethodHandle target, FunctionDescriptor function, Arena arena, Linker.Option... options);
    ... // some overloads omitted here

    static Linker nativeLinker() { ... }
}

The Linker::nativeLinker factory is used to obtain a Linker implementation for the ABI associated with the OS and processor where the Java runtime is currently executing. As such, the native linker can be used to call C functions. When interacting with the native linker, clients must provide a platform-dependent description of the signature of the C function they wish to link against. This description, a FunctionDescriptor defines the layouts associated with the parameter types and return type (if any) of the C function.

Scalar C types such as bool, int are modeled as value layouts of a suitable carrier. Which layout is used to model a C type can vary, depending on the data model supported by a given ABI. For instance, the C type long maps to the layout constant ValueLayout::JAVA_LONG on Linux/x64, but maps to the layout constant ValueLayout::JAVA_INT on Windows/x64. The Linker provides a method, namely Linker::canonicalLayouts to allow clients to discover the mapping between C types and memory layouts programmatically:

MemoryLayout SIZE_T = Linker.nativeLinker().canonicalLayouts().get("size_t");

Composite types are modeled as group layouts. More specifically, a C struct type maps to a StructLayout, whereas a C union type maps to a UnionLayout. When defining a struct or union layout, clients must pay attention to the size and alignment constraint of the corresponding composite type definition in C. For instance, padding between two struct fields must be modeled explicitly, by adding an adequately sized padding layout member to the resulting struct layout.

Finally, pointer types such as int**, and int(*)(size_t*, size_t*) are modeled as address layouts. When the spatial bounds of the pointer type are known statically, the address layout can be associated with a target layout. For instance, a pointer that is known to point to a C int[2] array can be modelled as follows:

ValueLayout.ADDRESS.withTargetLayout(
        MemoryLayout.sequenceLayout(2,
                                    Linker.nativeLinker().canonicalLayouts().get("int")));

For more exhaustive examples of mappings between C types and layouts, please refer to the appendix. In the following sections, we will assume Linux/x64 as our target platform.

Note: the jextract tool can generate all the required C layouts (for scalars and structs/unions) automatically, so that clients do not have to worry about platform-dependent details such as sizes, alignment constraints and padding.

Downcalls

We will now look at how foreign functions can be called from Java using the native linker. Assume we wanted to call the following function from the standard C library:

size_t strlen(const char *s);

In order to do that, we have to:

  • lookup the strlen symbol
  • describe the signature of the C function using a function descriptor
  • create a downcall native method handle with the above information, using the native linker

Here's an example of how we might want to do that (a full listing of all the examples in this and subsequent sections will be provided in the appendix):

Linker linker = Linker.nativeLinker();
MethodHandle strlen = linker.downcallHandle(
        linker.defaultLookup().find("strlen").get(),
        FunctionDescriptor.of(JAVA_LONG, ADDRESS)
);

Note that, since the function strlen is part of the standard C library, which is loaded with the VM, we can just use the default lookup of the native linker to look it up. The rest is pretty straightforward — the only tricky detail is how to model size_t: typically this type has the size of a pointer, so we can use JAVA_LONG both Linux and Windows. On the Java side, we model the size_t using a long and the pointer is modelled using an MemorySegment parameter.

Once we have obtained the downcall method handle, we can just use it as any other method handle:

try (Arena arena = Arena.ofConfined()) {
    long len = strlen.invokeExact(arena.allocateFrom("Hello")); // 5
}

Here we are using a confined arena to convert a Java string into an off-heap memory segment which contains a NULL terminated C string. We then pass that segment to the method handle and retrieve our result in a Java long. Note how all this is possible without any piece of intervening native code — all the interop code can be expressed in (low level) Java. Note also how we use an arena to control the lifecycle of the allocated C string, which ensures timely deallocation of the memory segment holding the native string.

The Linker interface also supports linking of native functions without an address known at link time; when that happens, an address (of type MemorySegment) must be provided when the method handle returned by the linker is invoked — this is very useful to support virtual calls. For instance, the above code can be rewritten as follows:

MethodHandle strlen_virtual = linker.downcallHandle( // address parameter missing!
		FunctionDescriptor.of(JAVA_LONG, ADDRESS)
);

try (Arena arena = Arena.ofConfined()) {
    long len = strlen_virtual.invokeExact(
        linker.defaultLookup().find("strlen").get() // address provided here!
        arena.allocateFrom("Hello")
    ); // 5
}

It is important to note that, albeit the interop code is written in Java, the above code can not be considered 100% safe. There are many arbitrary decisions to be made when setting up downcall method handles such as the one above, some of which might be obvious to us (e.g. how many parameters does the function take), but which cannot ultimately be verified by the Java runtime. After all, a symbol in a dynamic library is nothing but a numeric offset and, unless we are using a shared library with debugging information, no type information is attached to a given library symbol. This means that the Java runtime has to trust the function descriptor passed in1; for this reason, the Linker::nativeLinker factory is also a restricted method.

When working with shared arenas, it is always possible for the arena associated with a memory segment passed by reference to a native function to be closed (by another thread) while the native function is executing. When this happens, the native code is at risk of dereferencing already-freed memory, which might trigger a JVM crash, or even result in silent memory corruption. For this reason, the Linker API provides some basic temporal safety guarantees: any MemorySegment instance passed by reference to a downcall method handle will be kept alive for the entire duration of the call.

Performance-wise, the reader might ask how efficient calling a foreign function using a native method handle is; the answer is very. The JVM comes with some special support for native method handles, so that, if a give method handle is invoked many times (e.g, inside a hot loop), the JIT compiler might decide to generate a snippet of assembly code required to call the native function, and execute that directly. In most cases, invoking native function this way is as efficient as doing so through JNI.

Upcalls

Sometimes, it is useful to pass Java code as a function pointer to some native function; we can achieve that by using foreign linker support for upcalls. To demonstrate this, let's consider the following function from the C standard library:

void qsort(void *base, size_t nmemb, size_t size,
           int (*compar)(const void *, const void *));

The qsort function can be used to sort the contents of an array, using a custom comparator function — compar — which is passed as a function pointer. To be able to call the qsort function from Java we have first to create a downcall method handle for it:

Linker linker = Linker.nativeLinker();
MethodHandle qsort = linker.downcallHandle(
		linker.defaultLookup().lookup("qsort").get(),
        FunctionDescriptor.ofVoid(ADDRESS, JAVA_LONG, JAVA_LONG, ADDRESS)
);

As before, we use JAVA_LONG and long.class to map the C size_t type, and ADDRESS for both the first pointer parameter (the array pointer) and the last parameter (the function pointer).

This time, in order to invoke the qsort downcall handle, we need a function pointer to be passed as the last parameter; this is where the upcall support in foreign linker comes in handy, as it allows us to create a function pointer out of an existing method handle. First, let's write a function that can compare two int elements (passed as pointers):

class Qsort {
    static int qsortCompare(MemorySegment elem1, MemorySegmet elem2) {
        return elem1.get(JAVA_INT, 0) - elem2.get(JAVA_INT, 0);
    }
}

Here we can see that the function is performing some unsafe dereference of the pointer contents.

Now let's create a method handle pointing to the comparator function above:

FunctionDescriptor comparDesc = FunctionDescriptor.of(JAVA_INT,
                                                      ADDRESS.withTargetLayout(JAVA_INT),
                                                      ADDRESS.withTargetLayout(JAVA_INT));
MethodHandle comparHandle = MethodHandles.lookup()
                                         .findStatic(Qsort.class, "qsortCompare",
                                                     comparDesc.toMethodType());

To do that, we first create a function descriptor for the function pointer type. This descriptor uses address layouts that have a JAVA_INT target layout, to allow access operations inside the upcall method handle. We use the FunctionDescriptor::toMethodType to turn that function descriptor into a suitable MethodType instance to be used in a method handle lookup. Now that we have a method handle for our Java comparator function, we finally have all the ingredients to create an upcall stub, and pass it to the qsort downcall handle:

try (Arena arena = Arena.ofConfined()) {
    MemorySegment comparFunc = linker.upcallStub(comparHandle, comparDesc, arena);
    MemorySegment array = arena.allocateFrom(0, 9, 3, 4, 6, 5, 1, 8, 2, 7);
    qsort.invokeExact(array, 10L, 4L, comparFunc);
    int[] sorted = array.toArray(JAVA_INT); // [ 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 ]
}

The above code creates an upcall stub — comparFunc — a function pointer that can be used to invoke our Java comparator function, of type MemorySegment. The upcall stub is associated with the provided segment scope instance; this means that the stub will be uninstalled when the arena is closed.

The snippet then creates an off-heap array from a Java array, which is then passed to the qsort handle, along with the comparator function we obtained from the foreign linker. As a side effect, after the call, the contents of the off-heap array will be sorted (as instructed by our comparator function, written in Java). We can than extract a new Java array from the segment, which contains the sorted elements. This is a more advanced example, but one that shows how powerful the native interop support provided by the foreign linker abstraction is, allowing full bidirectional interop support between Java and native.

Variadic calls

Some C functions are variadic and can take an arbitrary number of arguments. Perhaps the most common example of this is the printf function, defined in the C standard library:

int printf(const char *format, ...);

This function takes a format string, which features zero or more holes, and then can take a number of additional arguments that is identical to the number of holes in the format string.

The foreign function support can support variadic calls, but with a caveat: the client must provide a specialized Java signature, and a specialized description of the C signature. For instance, let's say we wanted to model the following C call:

printf("%d plus %d equals %d", 2, 2, 4);

To do this using the foreign function support provided by the FFM API we would have to build a specialized downcall handle for that call shape, using a linker option2 to specify the position of the first variadic layout, as follows:

Linker linker = Linker.nativeLinker();
MethodHandle printf = linker.downcallHandle(
		linker.defaultLookup().lookup("printf").get(),
        FunctionDescriptor.of(JAVA_INT, ADDRESS, JAVA_INT, JAVA_INT, JAVA_INT)
        Linker.Option.firstVariadicArg(1) // first int is variadic
);

Then we can call the specialized downcall handle as usual:

try (Arena arena = Arena.ofConfined()) {
    int res = (int)printf.invokeExact(arena.allocateFrom("%d plus %d equals %d"), 2, 2, 4); //prints "2 plus 2 equals 4"
}

While this works, and provides optimal performance, it has some limitations3:

  • If the variadic function needs to be called with many shapes, we have to create many downcall handles
  • while this approach works for downcalls (since the Java code is in charge of determining which and how many arguments should be passed) it fails to scale to upcalls; in that case, the call comes from native code, so we have no way to guarantee that the shape of the upcall stub we have created will match that required by the native function.

Appendix

C types mapping in Linux/x64
C type Layout Java carrier
bool JAVA_BOOLEAN byte
char JAVA_BYTE byte
short JAVA_SHORT short, char
int JAVA_INT int
long JAVA_LONG long
long long JAVA_LONG long
float JAVA_FLOAT float
double JAVA_DOUBLE double
char*
int**
...		 ADDRESS MemorySegment
struct Point { int x; int y; };
union Choice { float a; int b; };
...		 MemoryLayout.structLayout(...)
MemoryLayout.unionLayout(...)
 MemorySegment
Full source code

The full source code containing most of the code shown throughout this document can be seen below:

import java.lang.foreign.Arena;
import java.lang.foreign.Linker;
import java.lang.foreign.FunctionDescriptor;
import java.lang.foreign.SymbolLookup;
import java.lang.foreign.MemorySegment;

import java.lang.invoke.MethodHandle;
import java.lang.invoke.MethodHandles;
import java.util.Arrays;

import static java.lang.foreign.ValueLayout.*;

public class Examples {

    static Linker LINKER = Linker.nativeLinker();
    static SymbolLookup STDLIB = LINKER.defaultLookup();

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Throwable {
        strlen();
        strlen_virtual();
        qsort();
        printf();
    }

    public static void strlen() throws Throwable {
        MethodHandle strlen = LINKER.downcallHandle(
                STDLIB.find("strlen").get(),
                FunctionDescriptor.of(JAVA_LONG, ADDRESS)
        );

        try (Arena arena = Arena.ofConfined()) {
            MemorySegment hello = arena.allocateFrom("Hello");
            long len = (long) strlen.invokeExact(hello); // 5
            System.out.println(len);
        }
    }

    public static void strlen_virtual() throws Throwable {
        MethodHandle strlen_virtual = LINKER.downcallHandle(
                FunctionDescriptor.of(JAVA_LONG, ADDRESS)
        );

        try (Arena arena = Arena.ofConfined()) {
            MemorySegment hello = arena.allocateFrom("Hello");
            long len = (long) strlen_virtual.invokeExact(
                    STDLIB.find("strlen").get(),
                    hello); // 5
            System.out.println(len);
        }
    }

    static class Qsort {
        static int qsortCompare(MemorySegment addr1, MemorySegment addr2) {
            return addr1.get(JAVA_INT, 0) - addr2.get(JAVA_INT, 0);
        }
    }

    public static void qsort() throws Throwable {
        MethodHandle qsort = LINKER.downcallHandle(
                STDLIB.find("qsort").get(),
                FunctionDescriptor.ofVoid(ADDRESS, JAVA_LONG, JAVA_LONG, ADDRESS)
        );
        FunctionDescriptor comparDesc = FunctionDescriptor.of(JAVA_INT,
                ADDRESS.withTargetLayout(JAVA_INT),
                ADDRESS.withTargetLayout(JAVA_INT));
        MethodHandle comparHandle = MethodHandles.lookup()
                .findStatic(Qsort.class, "qsortCompare",
                        comparDesc.toMethodType());

        try (Arena arena = Arena.ofConfined()) {
            MemorySegment comparFunc = LINKER.upcallStub(
                    comparHandle, comparDesc, arena);

            MemorySegment array = arena.allocateFrom(JAVA_INT, 0, 9, 3, 4, 6, 5, 1, 8, 2, 7);
            qsort.invokeExact(array, 10L, 4L, comparFunc);
            int[] sorted = array.toArray(JAVA_INT); // [ 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 ]
            System.out.println(Arrays.toString(sorted));
        }
    }

    public static void printf() throws Throwable {
        MethodHandle printf = LINKER.downcallHandle(
                STDLIB.find("printf").get(),
                FunctionDescriptor.of(JAVA_INT, ADDRESS, JAVA_INT, JAVA_INT, JAVA_INT),
                Linker.Option.firstVariadicArg(1) // first int is variadic
        );
        try (Arena arena = Arena.ofConfined()) {
            MemorySegment s = arena.allocateFrom("%d plus %d equals %d\n");
            int res = (int) printf.invokeExact(s, 2, 2, 4);
        }
    }
}