[Mono-devel-list] Pinvoking windows dll on linux?

[Jonathan Gilbert]

At 09:14 AM 08/12/2004 -0700, Peter Dennis wrote:
>>WINE-controlled threads became apparent. WINElib wasn't even a particularly
>>safe hack of WINE, and the WINE maintainers refused to consider adding it
>>to the main WINE distribution. It was these difficulties, I believe, that
>>caused the WINE-based implementation to be ditched.
>
>Actually, Paul Davis from linuxaudiosystems built some standalone WINE 
>threading fixes on top of my WINElib hack, and I later hacked those fixes 
>into WINE and in fact had a multi-threaded SWF app using WINE working.
>Considering that WINElib was very unintrusive (and quite safe, only about 10 
>lines of code changes to WINE) and yet it got rejected, I did not expect the 
>WINE guys to ever accept the threading patches to WINE.

I had heard that despite it only changing 10 lines of code, the WINElib
hack neglected certain corner cases and wasn't tested rigorously enough to
make the WINE maintainers happy..

>It was a nice proof of concept, and I'm hoping to be able to pick up on it 
>after we finish our System.Windows.Forms library, because it would help 
>support those applications that still do their own P/Invokes.

I'd like to see this too, I personally always felt that the WINElib
approach was intuitively a better idea. It would make the drawing API
consistent across platforms, including Windows where it'd simply use the
real thing, and it would innately support all those controls that make
silly assumptions about the underlying system API and event model. :-) I
was disappointed when I first read about the libgc threading problems, and
I'm glad a fix was found for that.

Jonathan Gilbert