e.g. <tt>local strlen = ffi.C.strlen</tt>. OTOH it
<em>is</em> useful to cache the namespace itself, e.g. <tt>local C =
ffi.C</tt>.
</p>

<h2 id="policy">No Hand-holding!</h2>
<p>
The FFI library has been designed as <b>a low-level library</b>. The
goal is to interface with C&nbsp;code and C&nbsp;data types with a
minimum of overhead. This means <b>you can do anything you can do
from&nbsp;C</b>: access all memory, overwrite anything in memory, call
machine code at any memory address and so on.
</p>
<p>
The 