Foreign Function Interface (FFI)

Foreign Function Interface, also known as FFI allows loading external libraries, such as .DLL or .so, and access directly their function without writing a PHP extension.

<?php
// Extracted from the PHP manual

// create FFI object, loading libc and exporting function printf()
$ffi = FFI::cdef(
    "int printf(const char *format, ...);", // this is a regular C declaration
    "libc.so.6");
// call C's printf()
$ffi->printf("Hello %s!\n", "world");
?>

Documentation

See also Blazingly Fast Markdown Parsing in PHP using FFI and Rust, PHPun with FFI: Getting Rust-ic