Library Usage with build.rs

💡 This is the recommended way to use bindgen. 💡

Often times C and C++ headers will have platform- and architecture-specific #ifdefs that affect the shape of the Rust FFI bindings we need to create to interface Rust code with the outside world. By using bindgen as a library inside your build.rs, you can generate bindings for the current target on-the-fly. Otherwise, you would need to generate and maintain x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu-bindings.rs, x86_64-apple-darwin-bindings.rs, etc... separate bindings files for each of your supported targets, which can be a huge pain. The downside is that everyone building your crate also needs libclang available to run bindgen.

Library API Documentation

📚 There is complete API reference documentation on docs.rs 📚

Tutorial

The next section contains a detailed, step-by-step tutorial for using bindgen as a library inside build.rs.