Calling C and Fortran

While Julia can rightfully claim to obviate the need to write some C or Fortran code, it is possible that you will need to interact with the existing C or Fortran shared libraries. Functions in such a library can be called directly by Julia, with no glue code, boilerplate code, or compilation needed. Because Julia's LLVM compiler generates native code, calling a C function from Julia has exactly the same overhead as calling the same function from C code itself. However, first, we need to know a few more things:

  • For calling out to C, we need to work with pointer types; a native pointer Ptr{T} is nothing more than the memory address for a variable of type T. You can use Cstring if the value is null-terminated.
  • At this ...

Get Julia 1.0 Programming now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.