Comment by neonsunset
2 years ago
What you may have been looking for is these:
- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/nati...
- https://github.com/dotnet/samples/blob/main/core/nativeaot/N...
With that said, Mono has been a staple choice for embedding in game-script style scenarios, in particular, because of the ability to directly call its methods inside (provided the caller honors the calling convention correctly), but it has been slowly becoming more of a liability as you are missing out on a lot of performance by not hosting CoreCLR instead.
For .dll/.so/.dylib's, it is easier and often better to just build a native library with naot instead (the links above, you can also produce statically linkable binaries but it might have issues on e.g. macOS which has...not the most reliable linker that likes to take breaking changes).
This type of library works in almost every scenario a library implemented in C/C++/Rust with C exports does. For example, here someone implemented a hello-world demonstration of using C# to write an OBS plugin: https://sharovarskyi.com/blog/posts/dotnet-obs-plugin-with-n...
Using the exports boils down to just this https://github.com/kostya9/DotnetObsPluginWithNativeAOT/blob... and specifying correct build flags.
I haven't been looking for those because I don't work with .NET. Regardless, what you're linking still needs callers and callees to agree on calling convention and special binding annotations across FFI boundaries which isn't particularly interesting from the perspective of language implementation like the promises of Graal or WASM + GC + component model.
There is no free lunch. WASM just means another lowest common denominator abstraction for FFI. I'm also looking forward to WASM getting actually good so .NET could properly target it (because shipping WASM-compiled GC is really, really painful, it works acceptably today, but could be better). Current WasmGC spec is pretty much unusable by any language that has non-primitive GC implementation.
Just please don't run WASM on the server, we're already getting diminishing generational performance gains in hardware, no need to reduce them further.
The exports in the examples follow C ABI with respective OS/ISA-specific calling convention.