How to replace cpan Perl utility P5NCI with FFI:Platypus

Below is perl code which calls P5NCI::load_func to load function load_library having signature as int load_library(int dummy), hence third argument is passed as ii to P5NCI::load_func

    my $library_path = P5NCI::find_lib( 'ESNMP.so' );
    $library      = P5NCI::load_lib( $library_path );
    print "\nLibrary loaded";
    print "\nlibrary_path".$library_path;
    my $funcldlib = P5NCI::load_func( $library, 'load_library', 'ii');

This was working fine till perl-5.14, but later I used it for perl-5.26.3, but I am getting error as below:

Don't understand NCI signature 'ii'

I am thinking to use FFI platypus. I have successfully compiled Platypus using below steps:

perl -MCPAN -e shell
install FFI::Platypus

Wanted to know how can I use FFI::Platypus to achieve same purpose as mentioned in above code with P5NCI

Regards, Amit Mendhe

Solution

Here is an example of how you can use FFI::Platypus and FFI::CheckLib to do the same as you did with P5NCI:

use feature qw(say);
use strict;
use warnings;
use FFI::Platypus;
use FFI::CheckLib;

my $libname = 'ESNMP';
my @libs = find_lib(lib => $libname, libpath => './lib');
die "Could not find libary '$libname'\n" if !@libs;
my $libpath = $libs[0];
my $ffi = FFI::Platypus->new();
$ffi->lib( $libpath );
my $function = $ffi->function('load_library', ['int'] => 'int');
my $input_value = 2;
my $return_value = $function->($input_value);
say "Return value: ", $return_value;

Note that this assumes that there is a file (the shared library) under the current directory called lib/libESNMP.so. This was the path I used for testing this script. I also assume that there is a function called load_library() defined in the shared library that takes an integer input argument and returns an integer.