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, or 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
  • At this lower level, the term bitstype is also used; bitstype is a ...

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