Scope

The types inside external declarations have their own environment. Normal let-bindings or statements like open won’t have any effect on them. (Ppx rewriters don’t have access to types and similar information).

By default only Ctypes.typ values of Ctypes_types.TYPE are accessible (the corresponding module is opened by default). It’s however possible to create new types that are then available inside your regular program and inside external declarations:

let%c int_as_bool = (* all bindings must be of type Ctypes.typ *)
  view
   int (* no access to your regular scope inside the expression *)
   ~read:(fun x -> if x = 0 then false else true)
   ~write:(fun x -> if x = false then 0 else 1)

(* int_as_bool is available in the regular scope *)
let ibptr = Ctypes.allocate int_as_bool true

(* function prototype in c:
   void *bsearch(const void *key, const void *base,
                 size_t nmemb, size_t size,
                 int (*compar)(const void *, const void *));
*)
let%c compar = funptr (ptr void @-> ptr void @-> returning int)
let%c ptr_void = ptr void;
let compar = 3 (* has no effect on the following external declaration *)
external bsearch:
  key: ptr_void
  -> base: ptr_void
  -> nmemb: size_t
  -> size: size_t
  -> compar
  -> ptr_void = "bsearch"

This also means that you can’t reference any Ctypes.typs that you’ve created in other files of your current project.

Cross Package Dependencies

Types from other libraries can however be made accessible: ppx_cstubs -pkg foo ... will make the types of the findlib library foo available to the preprocessor (it also works for plain .cma or .cmo files). You just have to ensure that your regular build instructions and the flags that are passed do ppx_cstubs are consistent.