When using FFI to invoke native (C) functions from Dart, we often want to pass some kind of buffer/pointer to a packaged asset.
The "easy" way is to use rootBundle.load and then copy into a Pointer which is passed via FFI. There are two obvious problems with this:
- this requires a copy, which can be quite slow for large assets,
- this requires allocation on the Dart GC heap.
These are both unnecessary, which this plugin addresses by exposing various functions for opening packaged assets and working directly with void* pointers.
This plugin also lets you convert assets to file descriptors in the form of named pipes on Android (created via mkfifo) - this is not required on iOS as all assets can be accessed as regular files). However this is buggy and I wouldn't advise using it.