Scala and C – tight as brothers
summary
Scala Native interoperates with C using a binding generator called sbt-bindgen and a growing toolset that already wraps OpenSSL into Java Security, exposes curl as a Java net HTTP client, and provides libpq/SQLite/DuckDB bindings; largest practical limit is 22 C fields for native structs so very large FFmpeg structs (151 fields) are encoded as byte blobs with computed offsets causing alignment pitfalls. There is a tested repo SNBindGen plus a 100% Scala Native web backend using HTTP4s Cats Effect FS2 Skunk and a mono-repo of examples (curl, DuckDB, JNI, Lua, MySQL, OpenSSL, tree-sitter) showing practical but sometimes awkward workarounds like the structs-by-value limitation.
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chapters (17)
- 0:00Scala Native and C interop
- 1:08Why Scala Native needs C interop
- 3:13C library integration state
- 4:16C ABI and challenges
- 7:28ABI in action with examples
- 9:36Why C libraries matter
- 10:19Structs and memory layout
- 13:55Recursive definitions and unions
- 16:23Large structs and alignment
- 18:05C enums and macros
- 19:50C macros and attributes complexity
- 21:14Encoding C in Scala
- 22:15C vs Scala Native code
- 23:41C library integration examples
- 24:45SNBindGen introduction
- 25:26SNBindGen demo
- 26:07Conclusion and future
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