How to call C from Swift?

Question

Is there a way to call C routines from Swift?

A lot of iOS / Apple libraries are C only and I\'d still like to be able to call those.

For example, I\'d like

Answer 1

It appears to be a rather different ball 'o wax when dealing with pointers. Here's what I have so far for calling the C POSIX read system call:

enum FileReadableStreamError : Error {
case failedOnRead
}

// Some help from: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/38983277/how-to-get-bytes-out-of-an-unsafemutablerawpointer
// and https://gist.github.com/kirsteins/6d6e96380db677169831
override func readBytes(size:UInt32) throws -> [UInt8]? {
    guard let unsafeMutableRawPointer = malloc(Int(size)) else {
        return nil
    }

    let numberBytesRead = read(fd, unsafeMutableRawPointer, Int(size))

    if numberBytesRead < 0 {
        free(unsafeMutableRawPointer)
        throw FileReadableStreamError.failedOnRead
    }

    if numberBytesRead == 0 {
        free(unsafeMutableRawPointer)
        return nil
    }

    let unsafeBufferPointer = UnsafeBufferPointer(start: unsafeMutableRawPointer.assumingMemoryBound(to: UInt8.self), count: numberBytesRead)

    let results = Array(unsafeBufferPointer)
    free(unsafeMutableRawPointer)

    return results
}