[Mono-list] PInvoke Conventions

[Miguel de Icaza]

Rhys,

> And which will no doubt be hard-wired to Mono API
> and autoconf conventions, and hence useless to anyone
> else who may be interested in running applications built
> to work with the Mono C# library.  Hence, the rest of
> us will have to start from scratch.

As I said in an earlier message, I am willing to accomodate the needs
of other CLI runtime implementations (it is on a separate thread).

Now, even if we took radically different approaches (PInvoke
annotations vs generated support libraries), the changes are going to
be isolated in one, maybe two "private" classes at most.  

No matter what direction we take with the Mono class libraries, in the
worst possible case, you would have to write a single class that would
work for Portable.NET.

And my offer is to have those changes integrated directly into the
class distribution of Mono.  Hey, I can even give you CVS access to
the tree to make those changes yourself and make sure the makefiles
can work with both setups.

> The proposal to use type diversion, where "stat" can be
> diverted to a "NativeStat" in a platform-specific assembly
> is much better than this.  The platform-specific parts are
> completely in a C#-based "native.dll" which is portable
> from one VM to another.  Any approach that uses C to
> make the glue will bind the C# library to one VM only.

The problem is -As Ferguson- pointed out that this is just a lot of
bloat for the runtime when there is a simpler solution available.

What if Mono has mononat.dll and you have portnat.dll?  Big deal, a
tiny library that does not really make a difference.

Miguel.