hs-bindgen

hs-bindgen is a Haskell library that automatically generates Haskell FFI bindings from C header files.

[!WARNING] This project has not had an official release yet. There is a wide variety of C (and C preprocessor) code in the world, so we are currently soliciting feedback prior to the first official release. Please try it out! If something breaks, please check the issues to see if the problem is already known, and open an issue if not.

Check the releases (RSS) for release information. A Hackage package will be made available from the first official release.

Documentation

• hs-bindgen Manual
• hs-bindgen Nix tutorial

Blog posts

• Second pre-release of hs-bindgen by Edsko de Vries (27 March 2026)
• hs-bindgen 0.1-alpha release by Edsko de Vries (10 February 2026)

Community

• Wait, this isn't Haskell... by Curtis Chin Jen Sem (26 December 2025)

Papers

• Automatic C Bindings Generation for Haskell (9 October 2025)
  • Presentation

Examples

We test hs-bindgen with various C projects, and we include some examples in this repository. Please note that these are used for testing and are not meant to be complete. See the examples README for details.

Examples include:

• Botan, a C++ cryptography library: bindings
• libpcap, an interface to various kernel packet capture mechanisms: bindings
• LibYAML, a YAML parser and emitter library: bindings
• MiniSat, a minimalistic, open-source SAT solver: bindings
• QR-Code-generator, a library for generating QR codes: bindings
• RogueUtil, a cross-platform C library for terminal manipulation: bindings
• rpm, a powerful package management system: bindings
• Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF), a framework for embedding Chromium-based browsers in other applications: bindings

Packages in this repository

• hs-bindgen, a utility that automatically generates Haskell bindings from C headers
• hs-bindgen-runtime, a library that provides runtime support for code generated by hs-bindgen
• hs-bindgen-test-runtime, a library for testing bindings generated by hs-bindgen

Supporting packages

• c-expr-dsl and c-expr-runtime, a DSL for C macro semantics
• doxygen-parser, a parser for the XML files generated by the Doxygen CLI
• libclang-bindings, a library that provides bindings for the LLVM/Clang libclang C API

Contributors

Our thanks go to those who have contributed to hs-bindgen and supporting packages with development, bug reports, feature requests, blog posts, etc., including:

• Alex Mason
• andromeda-fp
• Armando Santos
• aveltras
• Chandler Barlow
• Curtis Chin Jen Sem
• Dmitry Kovalev
• Dominik Schrempf
• Duncan Coutts
• Edsko de Vries
• Finley McIlwaine
• George Thomas
• Jeremy Nuttall
• Jonathan Lorimer
• Joris Dral
• Justin Le
• Krantz98
• Lin Jian
• Matthias Heinzel
• Merivuokko
• Oleg Grenrus
• Phil de Joux
• Rodrigo Mesquita
• Ruifeng Xie
• Sam Derbyshire
• Shea Levy
• Tobias Dammers
• Travis Cardwell
• Travis Whitaker