[Mono-list] Combining Virtuoso and Mono

[Tim Haynes]

Hi,

OpenLink Software is interested in hosting the Mono run time inside its
Virtuoso universal server. We are working on providing CLR hosting inside
our server under Windows and true to our cross platform focus wish to offer
similar capabilities on other platforms.

Virtuoso offers DBMS and application server capabilities, inlcuding a full
SQL 99 implementation. Virtuoso plus Mono would be an offering comparable
to Microsoft's next SQL Server, featuring tight SQL to CLR integration.

For realizing these goals we need to be able to instantiate a hosting
environment from inside unmanaged C code in a multithreaded, thread-safe
environment (pthreads). We need to keep safe references to garbage
collectable content in unmanaged data structures, invoke the reflection
classes etc.

As the end result of this, we will have a general purpose hosting interface
for Mono within Virtuoso.

We know that such a thing is not immediate on your roadmap and thus would
be interested in considering donating results of our unmanaged interface
related development work to the Mono project if we could get some technical
support for our developers for getting started in this direction.

Specifically, we would appreciate either a pointer to existing
documentation or assistance with the following points:

- How do we register an instance handle in unmanaged memory for GC?
- How do we call a method of an instance given the name and signature?
- How do we pass C scalars and arrays to and from managed code?

Please address any technical inquiries to me, Tim Haynes,
thaynes@openlinksw.com.

Thanks in advance,

~Tim
-- 
Product Development Consultant
OpenLink Software
Tel: +44 (0) 20 8681 7701
Web: <http://www.openlinksw.com>
Universal Data Access & Data Integration Technology Providers