[Mono-list] Questions on the Mono roadmap

[Dallman, John]

I'm starting work on interfacing some existing native
code libraries (which have versions for a wide variety
of platforms) to .NET code. Windows is the immediate
platform, but we'd like to have some idea of if/when
it will be possible to do the same on UNIX/Linux
platforms.

I've found that I need some specific .NET 2.0 features,
and would like to know if they're at all likely to make
it into Mono 1.2, or if I should expect to have to wait
until Mono 2.0, or forever. They are:

* Delegates with the attribute to specify that if they're
  used to call native code, said code uses the C (cdecl)=20
  calling convention, rather than the Pascal (stdcall)=20
  calling convention that's the default for Microsoft C#.
  The syntax goes thus:

    [UnmanagedFunctionPointerAttribute( CallingConvention.Cdecl)]
    public delegate int TEST_callback_f_t(int a, int b);

* Marshal.GetDelegateForFunctionPointer(), which creates a
  delegate that wraps a pointer to a native code function.

* Managed C++ ;-) We will use this to create interfaces=20
  to .NET code that can be called by native C code. There=20
  doesn't seem to be an equivalent of C++ 'extern "C"' in=20
  C#, so we haven't found a way to create C-callable=20
  functions in C#. It seems very unlikely that we'd be=20
  able to take a Managed C++ DLL from Windows onto a Mono
  platform and link C code against it successfully, so we=20
  need a way to build Managed C++ code on the Mono platform=20
  - or some other language that can provide C-callable=20
  interfaces and call C# code.

* Support for calling 64-bit native code, on 64-bit Linux,=20
  Solaris, et al.=20

thanks!

--=20
John Dallman