Generate Haskell bindings from C header files with hs-bindgen

In this tutorial, we showcase the automatic generation of Haskell bindings with hs-bindgen on selected libraries:

Example 1: pcap

libpcap is an interface to various kernel packet capture mechanisms. We present two methods to generate Haskell bindings and use the generated bindings to print the list of network devices available on the local machine. The tutorial on pcap is available in the hs-pcap sub-folder of this repository.

Example 2: wlroots

wlroots is a modular Wayland compositor library. The wlroots project is more complex than libpcap and depends on non-system libraries such as Wayland and Pixman. Therefore, we split the generation of Haskell bindings into several library components. We use external binding specifications to inform higher-level library components about types defined in lower-level library components. The tutorial on wlroots is available in the hs-wlroots sub-folder of this repository.

Note

In both cases we use the Nix package manager to manage installation of hs-bindgen and other system dependencies.

Important

Last update: January 13, 2026. The upstream Nix Flake may have received updates in the meantime.