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Comment by stusmall | Hacker News Reader

"Java interoperability will be available on all platforms."

Where can I find more details on this?

There are not really any yet. We intend to take the Java interop that Mono already supports, improve it as needed, and make it available to other scenarios beyond just Android. If there are certain things you would like to see, I'd love to know.

I'll read up on how Mono handles it. I've never done too much .NET and I'm a recovering JVM dev, I was just asking out of curiosity since that is a pretty thorny feature to tackle. I can think of a number of dangers/shortcomings with any approach I can think of.

I would like to know more too. Not being able to call java libraries is one of the biggest problems with .NET. There are a ton of java libraries that don’t have good .NET equivalents.

If only they could just add a very easy way to invoke functions (at least those with simple interfaces, i.e. taking just simple value types as inputs and returning a simple value type) from other languages (incl. Java and Python) this would already be a huge value boost even if performance would be not perfect.

Well, if you can get a C-compatible pointer to those functions you're already ready to go, and the inverse is true if those languages can consume C-compatible function pointers.

So from python you could probably flex to use ctypes, and from java, JNI. Naturally this is a bit awkward but I expect the mono binding tools would help smooth it over for Java (I have no idea about Python there.)

I know it's possible this way but I've mentioned "very easy" intentionally. I'd manage with what we have if I really needed it but if it was easier it could attract much more people who generally are scared away by words like JNI and C-compatible pointers.

If I were developing a program language and sought to attract more people I would consider seamless invocation of code written in other languages a strategic height.

This line also caught my attention. Really keen on finding out more!

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