[Mono-list] Questions on the Mono roadmap

[Paolo Molaro]

On 01/18/05 Dallman, John wrote:
> * Managed C++ ;-) We will use this to create interfaces 

Ugh. Managed C++ should be avoided if you want to port the code:
try to restrict its use as much as possible, so when you port you
can rewrite the small bit of work. The new CLI/C++ proposal
is not much better either, especially if you're interested in
64 bit platforms: it's designed to work only on braindamaged
64 bit archs with 32 bit longs (ie win64).

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

There is a tool that can be used to create C libraries
from assemblies automatically. It can probably be tweaked
to suit your needs (like create C++ classes instead of
C functions). See the mcs/tools/cilc dir in svn.
It's not yet clear how to keep it working when we'll have
a moving GC, though (in mono 2.0).

lupus

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