Hacker News Reader

Comment by sanxiyn | Hacker News Reader

You could say this is P/Invoke for Java, which .NET had for more than a decade now. Better late than never I guess.

Has P/Invoke been cross-platform for a decade? Additionally, does it parse C headers to create native type wrappers automatically? Last I checked (a long time ago), P/Invoke required you to annotate manually written prototypes?

Yes, P/Invoke has been working cross-platform for a decade with Mono. Have you heard of this thing called Gtk#?

P/Invoke does not parse C headers, but neither does this proposal.

Ah right, Mono. I keep forgetting that was a thing.

This proposal will pave the way for jextract, though. I would argue this series of JEPs is much closer in spirit to something like Rust's cxx than P/Invoke is.

No it isn't. As _old_dude_ pointed out, this is a runtime API that generates JIT wrappers. Rust's cxx does no runtime code generation, while P/Invoke does.

I was not talking about runtime vs compile time, I was talking about how you interact with it as an end user.

Java had it first actually, because P/Invoke was one of the extensions Microsoft added to J++.

Actually, what Java had was J/Direct. P/Invoke was created specifically for C#.

They are the same thing, replace Java annotations with .NET attributes and call it something else due to the lawsuit.

    /** @dll.import("USER32", entrypoint="GetSysColor") */
    static native int getSysColor(int nIndex);

versus

    [DllImport("USER32", EntryPoint = "GetSysColor")]
    static extern int GetSysColor(int nIndex);

Reply on news.ycombinator.com