Blog Index

Update On FFI Bindings

by b5

We wanted to share an important update about the Kotlin, Python, Swift, and JavaScript FFI bindings for iroh. After a lot of thought, we’ve decided that we won’t be updating these bindings with iroh releases until we can improve the experience of using FFI.

Why?

Two reasons:

  1. Because we don’t think our FFI story is good enough right now. Our promise is to ship “P2P that works”, and we’re not hitting that “just works” experience in languages that aren’t rust.
  2. We’re concerned about ecosystem fragmentation. If one person writes an iroh protocol but does it in python via FFI bindings, that will only work for Iroh in python. This is likely what will happen in the long run regardless of what we do, but we want to see if we can make things easier.

What’s the plan?

We have three possible solutions we’re actively chasing, and will update you as we make progress on which we think will work the best.

  1. Move language integration up a level: community members are having success with projects like flutter rust bridge & react native UniFFI. We’ll likely lean into this either way, the only question is is this the only FFI solution, or do we need more?
  2. Ship composable FFI across iroh protocols. This would give tooling to iroh protocol developers for automatically generating FFI APIs that can compose together in the host language. dignifiedquire has been hacking on a prototype, but it doesn’t yet work, and we don’t know if it will. For more information on the current blockers we are facing, take a look at these issues:
  3. Ship 1.0, do native implementations of iroh in each language. After 1.0 we will have a proper spec to work from. There’s no way we could pull this off without community support, and we’re not going to ask people to do that until after we ship 1.0, and know that iroh has a solid spec to build on.

So, You’re just giving up on other languages?

No! We’re still shipping iroh in browsers. We’re still working on running these plans to ground, all futures for iroh pass through robust support for javascript, kotlin, swift, and python at a minimum, we just want to get it right and don’t want to waste your time until we’re confident our support for each language matches the experience we’re currently providing in rust.

When can I expect an update?

Deciding on a path forward is part of our 1.0 roadmap, which is slated to come out in the 2nd half of 2025, you can subscribe for updates here, or keep an eye on the changelog.

Want to Keep Using iroh-ffi?

We know some of you are using the existing FFI bindings, and if you’d like to keep them updated, we’d love to see community contributions! If you’re interested, you’re more than welcome to submit pull requests:

If you’d rather build your own FFI bindings and focus only on the parts you need, here are a couple of great resources to help you get started:

We really appreciate all of your support, and we’re excited for what’s ahead! If you have any thoughts or ideas, feel free to share them with us on GitHub or join us on discord.

Thanks for being part of the journey!

Iroh is a dial-any-device networking library that just works. Compose from an ecosystem of ready-made protocols to get the features you need, or go fully custom on a clean abstraction over dumb pipes. Iroh is open source, and already running in production on hundreds of thousands of devices.
To get started, take a look at our docs, dive directly into the code, or chat with us in our discord channel.