Using Windows DLL from Linux

Question

We need to interface to 3rd party app, but company behind the app doesn't disclose message protocol and provides only Windows DLL to interface to.

Our application is Linux-based so I cannot directly communicate with DLL. I couldn't find any existing solution so I'm considering writing socket-based bridge between Linux and Windows, however I'm sure it is not such a unique problem and somebody should have done it before.

Are you aware of any solution that allows to call Windows DDL functions from C app on Linux? It can use Wine or separate Windows PC - doesn't matter.

Many thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I wrote a small Python module for calling into Windows DLLs from Python on Linux. It is based on IPC between a regular Linux/Unix Python process and a Wine-based Python process. Because I have needed it in too many different use-cases / scenarios myself, I designed it as a "generic" ctypes module drop-in replacement, which does most of the required plumbing automatically in the background.

Example: Assume you're in Python on Linux, you have Wine installed, and you want to call into msvcrt.dll (the Microsoft C runtime library). You can do the following:

import zugbruecke as ctypes
dll_pow = ctypes.cdll.msvcrt.pow
dll_pow.argtypes = (ctypes.c_double, ctypes.c_double)
dll_pow.restype = ctypes.c_double
print('You should expect "1024.0" to show up here: "%.1f".' % dll_pow(2.0, 10.0))

Source code (LGPL), PyPI package & documentation.

It's still a bit rough around the edges (i.e. alpha and insecure), but it does handle most types of parameters (including pointers).