[Mono-list] Mono/Java interop?

[Miguel de Icaza]

hello!

> Although similar, I don't think the two libraries are close enough to
> perform this mapping successfully. I think such an approach will provide
> shallow interoperability that initally looks good, but worsens the more
> complexity you introduce. My personal feeling is that cross-compilation
> (like http://www.go-mono.com/java.html) doesn't add as much value as
> "bridging"...

I think you should handle specially a few classes, and the rest would
come from an existing class library like GNU Classpath.

> (c) Complex pass-by-value objects which likely as not have no
> representation in the other framework; imagine sending eg a
> javax.swing.JButton to .Net (remember it cant instatiate it directly as
> .Net doesn't understand the Java class definition). How is .Net going to
> handle this piece of data?

It is a problem for a full bridge, but not for a common subset.  For
example, take the .NET Common Type System (CTS): it defines a subset of
the features available to languages (and it is for example a subset of
C#, not every C# feature can be exposed to the CTS).

Trying to solve the very complex problem of a perfect mapping is the
path to oblivion, you want to make a compromise, and go for a subset. 
CORBA for instance defines a nice subset that maps to a number of modern
languages. 

> Since this is a .Net focused list, I guess there is greater interest in
> making Java work with .Net than the other way round. Therefore,
> obtaining or producing some specification of the Remoting binary
> protocol seems a critical early step. This may mean reverse-engineering
> it from the shared source CLI.

Well, I would be interested in having a BinaryFormatter implementation,
as we do not even have one today, but from the looks of it, its probably
the worst thing we can do.

I really want to encourage people to work on a CORBA implementation.

Miguel