[Mono-devel-list] Writing plugins for Firefox

[Mike Shaver]

I've been working on this for a little while, in my copious spare
time.  I stick occasional tarballs up in http://off.net/~shaver/mono/,
and there's a tla repository somewhere I forget the location of.

The COM-interop stuff would be interesting for me, because it would
probably make the QI-as-cast syntax work, but it's not a requirement
for now.  There is nothing architecturally hard about the work that's
left, just writing a lot of type converters, some mono-bootstrapping
code, and the implementing the component loader.  Currently, pretty
much everything is in managed code, other than some helper extern "C"
stubs to talk to the Mozilla XPCOM/C++ entry points, and implement the
vtable impersonator.  I'd like to keep it that way, and rely as little
as possible on the mono embedding API, so that it also works well with
.NET (where "well" includes "requiring as little divergent code as
possible").

There are some decent optimization options available, too, which I'd
like to explore, but mainly I just want to spend the remaining ~40
hours required to get it to the point where you can implement a
component in C# and have it Just Work.

I should put all this in svn somewhere, or fix my tla setup, or
something.  I hoped to hack on it this weekend, after a secret admirer
pushed my buttons a little bit, but didn't get time.  Maybe this week
I'll get lucky with time.

Mike