[Mono-list] Newbie question-com and mono

[Miguel de Icaza]

hello,

> I see your point, but what are the interop possibilities for:
> - CORBA
> - Java running on a Sun or IBM [or Apple] VM
> - Native legacy [C/C++] code

COM support is special because the runtime has to know about COM, and
has to provide dynamically wrappers to expose C# components as COM
components and to import COM components automatically.


      * CORBA

        This support is something that we are not planning on doing
        right now.
        
        Other mechanisms of interoperability like CORBA do not require
        the elaborate work on the runtime.  In fact, a complete CORBA
        implementation can be written in C# [1].
        
        Our priorities are to complete Mono, and only then we could look
        at other projects ourselves. 
        
        CORBA will have to get done at some point, as I am interested in
        producing and consuming CORBA components from the Gnome world in
        Unix.
        
      * Other Java protocols.

        Java can speak CORBA, so that would let you talk to it.  I am
        not sure about how Java RMI works so I wont comment on that. 
        
      * C and C++

	We provide P/Invoke which is used extensively to call C-based
	libraries.  

	C++ remains an area that we have not addressed.  Someone did 
	some work a while ago (it is posted on mono-list) to change the
	layout of our objects to match the C++ compiler layout.  He did
	this to allow transparent C++/.NET object integration, but we
	have not folded those changes in (nor studied how complete the
	solution is).  

	This is something you might want to dig more into if you have a
	big interest.


[1] This something I would love to see happen, I have posted in the past
a few ideas on how to get this done, but I would post it again if
someone is seriously looking at implementing it.

Miguel