[Mono-dev] Mixed Mode Assemblies

[Alex Corrado]

On Sat, Jul 9, 2011 at 2:12 PM, Tom Spink <tspink at gmail.com> wrote:
> I agree with you here, Jon, and it sounds like quite an interesting
> exercise. Of course, one of the other interesting things here would be what
> compiler do you use to generate a mixed-mode ELF?  Or, how do you embed IL
> (and associated metadata) into your ELF - what process do you run to create
> this combination ELF?

That would be nice and easy if the linker supported adding arbitrary
sections. Then we'd just need a tool to extract the CLI parts from the
PE file and create a binary blob that could be passed off to the
linker. We would also need a way to generate native stubs that would
load and initialize the mono runtime and a way to expose the managed
API as native entry points. Since the CLI is OO, it would make sense
to expose the managed API in a way that would be consumable from some
native object system, like C++, Obj-C, or GObject.

> Also, not having looked at the Mono PE loader (in depth), I don't know how
> hard it would be to abstract the container format away from reading
> metadata.  And after having glanced at it just now - it doesn't look /too/
> horrendous.

Would this really be necessary? Wouldn't it be cleaner if the
ELF/Mach-o binary just linked with libMono and we exposed a native
entry point that would use the Mono embedding APIs to call the managed
Main method?

This does, indeed sound like quite an interesting exercise.

Best,

Alex Corrado