CsWin32 VS ClangSharp

If you do have headers, you don't have to write the bindings by hand: https://github.com/dotnet/ClangSharp?tab=readme-ov-file#gene...

Also because this is Windows, there is https://github.com/microsoft/CsWin32 already (and adjacent libraries) which rely on the same generator.

I feel that nowadays Rust is the language to go when you are doing system programming, but C# is not a bad choice either. With .NET 9 being released in a few weeks we will get NativeAOT (compilation to a native single binary) for x86 (x64 and ARM64 are already available). At work, I'm writing patches for legacy apps and needed to use C++ for most of my tasks. Nowadays, I'm doing more and more stuff in C# and enjoying it. For WinAPI there is a fantastic cswin32 [1] project that generates FFIs signatures on the fly. And it's fairly simple to extend it for other Windows libraries (I did it for detours [2], for example). And using pointers or working with native memory blocks is straightforward and intuitive for people with C/C++ background.

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/CsWin32

[2] https://lowleveldesign.wordpress.com/2024/07/11/implementing...

This was mostly a project for fun, to dive into CsWin32 - a PInvoke source generator as well to fiddle around with the DWM API.

If you haven't seen the CsWin32 project, you can use it to generate all your bindings as well. It generates the raw extern bindings, and then friendly wrappers for C# (where possible) that also work really well with PowerShell.

My best guess would be to use CsWin32 to wrangle the audio sinks used by variious WASAPI sessions.

If you're looking for something different, try out writing windows programs using Win32 via CsWin32. You can generate a DLL that you Add-Type into PowerShell that lets you access all of Win32.

Also worth mentioning is this C# source generator for generating P/Invoke methods for win32 APIs: https://github.com/microsoft/CsWin32

Idk what all the hubub is about FolderBrowserDialog, it's pretty easy to make the Win32 calls (you can even code generate the interop calls).

You could try this to auto-generate it.

If you do have headers, you don't have to write the bindings by hand: https://github.com/dotnet/ClangSharp?tab=readme-ov-file#gene...

Also because this is Windows, there is https://github.com/microsoft/CsWin32 already (and adjacent libraries) which rely on the same generator.

You can easily generate bindings out of header files with CLangSharpPInvokeGenerator.

https://github.com/dotnet/ClangSharp

The author of WASM suggestions has clearly never done interop on server applications in C# and I caution against his replies.

Give this tool a try: https://github.com/dotnet/ClangSharp?tab=readme-ov-file#gene...

Just specify the headers to generate bindings for, and then use the generated interop code. Not too different from importing header file(s) effectively.

One of the most surprising things I learned about "clang" was how relatively poor the "libClang" capabilities are.

I wanted to write a codegen tool that would auto-generate bindings for C++ code, and it turns out that "libTooling" is the only reasonable way to get access to the proper info you need from C++.

Another alternative is "libClangSharp", from Tanner Gooding who works on C# at Microsoft.

https://github.com/dotnet/ClangSharp

Bindings for C++ are tricky due to function name mangling and also due to ABI compat, it's basically impossible to interop with a std::vector for example. Afaik the most common approach is to PInvoke thin C wrappers around the C++ functions. There are tons of binding generators for this but they aren't without problems (not worth if you have a small API surface).

3: Throwing my work away and using ClangSharpto create the bindings, unfortunately the header file for the shared library lists other C library's that I can not find online such as > #include

I've found this to be true, with the exception that a few people have taken to "augmenting" libclang with extra bindings to libTooling functions or other C++-only methods.

Most notably is Tanner Gooding & Co's "libClangSharp" from the Microsoft "ClangSharp" project, and PathogenDavid's "Biohazrd" libraries (which again are a sort of enhanced fork based on ClangSharp):

  https://github.com/microsoft/ClangSharp  # See "/sources/libClangSharp"

If you want to go down that route, clangsharp can do this for you.