uniffi-bindgen-cpp - UniFFI C++ bindings/scaffolding generator
December 11, 2025 ยท View on GitHub
Generate UniFFI bindings for C++. uniffi-bindgen-cpp lives
as a separate project from uniffi-rs, as per
uniffi-rs #1355.
How to install
Minimum Rust version required to install uniffi-bindgen-cpp is 1.74.
Newer Rust versions should also work fine.
cargo install uniffi-bindgen-cpp --git https://github.com/NordSecurity/uniffi-bindgen-cpp --tag v0.8.1+v0.29.4
How to generate bindings
Generating with a single UDL file
uniffi-bindgen-cpp path/to/definitions.udl
Generating using a library file
uniffi-bindgen-cpp --library your_rust_library.so --out-dir output_directory
Regardless of the generation method, these files are produced:
path/to/definitions.hpppath/to/definitions.cpppath/to/definitions_scaffolding.hpp
How to integrate bindings
To integrate the bindings into your projects, simply add the generated bindings files to your project. C++20 is required to compile the bindings.
Unsupported features
The following uniffi features are unsupported.
- External types
- Async functions
Configuration options
It's possible to configure some settings by passing --config
argument to the generator.
Note: configuration is not supported when using library mode
uniffi-bindgen-cpp path/to/definitions.udl --config path/to/uniffi.toml
C++ Scaffolding
It is possible to generate C++ uniffi scaffolding that allows bridging C++ code with any other uniffi supported language (except Rust). More documentation and limitations can be found in the scaffolding documentation
Versioning
uniffi-bindgen-cpp is versioned separately from uniffi-rs. UniFFI follows the SemVer rules from
the Cargo Book
which states "Versions are considered compatible if their left-most non-zero
major/minor/patch component is the same". A breaking change is any modification to the C++ bindings
that demands the consumer of the bindings to make corresponding changes to their code to ensure that
the bindings continue to function properly. uniffi-bindgen-cpp is young, and it's unclear how stable
the generated bindings are going to be between versions. For this reason, major version is currently
0, and most changes are probably going to bump minor version.
To ensure consistent feature set across external binding generators, uniffi-bindgen-cpp targets
a specific uniffi-rs version. A consumer using Go bindings (in uniffi-bindgen-go) and C#
bindings (in uniffi-bindgen-cs) expects the same features to be available across multiple bindings
generators. This means that the consumer should choose external binding generator versions such that
each generator targets the same uniffi-rs version.
To simplify this choice uniffi-bindgen-cpp, uniffi-bindgen-cs and uniffi-bindgen-go use tag naming convention
as follows: vX.Y.Z+vA.B.C, where X.Y.Z is the version of the generator itself, and A.B.C is
the version of uniffi-rs it is based on.
The table shows uniffi-rs version history for tags that were published before tag naming convention described above was introduced.
| uniffi-bindgen-cpp version | uniffi-rs version |
|---|---|
| v0.1.0 | v0.25.0 |
| v0.2.0 | v0.25.0 |
| v0.2.1 | v0.25.0 |
| v0.2.2 | v0.25.0 |
| v0.7.0 | v0.28.3 |
| v0.8.0 | v0.29.4 |
Documentation
More documentation is available in docs directory.
Contributing
For contribution guidelines, read CONTRIBUTING.md.