JNA VS Silk.NET

Wonder if this will make JNA (Java Native Access) redundant at some point: https://github.com/java-native-access/jna

Very useful, especially the prebundled platform bindings.

As far as I understand it, with JNA, all calls into C code go through libffi: https://github.com/java-native-access/jna/blob/master/www/Fu...

This means that every call sets up some libffi data structures and libffi uses this information to perform the native call. Likewise in the other direction for return values. With JNI (and Panama), Hotspot can directly emit the argument/return code a the call, not too dissimilar from what a C or C++ compiler would do. There is still some overhead from maintaining JVM invariants. For example, I think a thread blocked in an FFI call can still participate in a safepoint. But that applies to JNI as well.

If you were prepared to go to the JVM you might try JNA. https://github.com/java-native-access/jna

Other good example, but for Java platform is JNA library. Do not mix it with Java's JNI, which is a bad example of how it could be done.

In case you haven't used it (assuming that you already know about JNI, for comparison) - https://github.com/java-native-access/jna is about as easy as it gets for native interop. Also, as mentioned in another comment, with the Java FFM (Foreign Function and Memory) API already in preview mode, pretty soon, there will be no external dependencies at all, and Java should be able to interop with any language that can talk to C.

The complexity of JNI has given rise to some community-driven libraries that make it simpler to do FFI in Java. Java Native Access (JNA) is one of them. It's built on top of JNI and at least makes FFI easier to use, especially as it removes the need to write any C binding code manually and reduces the chances of memory safety issues. Still, it has some of the disadvantages of being JNI-based and is slightly slower than JNI in many cases. However, JNA is widely used and battle-tested, so definitely a better option than using JNI directly.

This is about calling into any native operating system APIs, as long as they are callable via C or C++ (which these days means "all" operating system APIs).

JNI is somewhat harder to use, because you need custom glue on both sides of the border: Some custom classes in Java and some custom code on the C (and C++) side.

This proposal would remove the need for the glue on the C side and would allow a pure java solution.

Something like this has existed in third-party form for a while as JNA (https://github.com/java-native-access/jna), but now it's going to be built into the JRE itself (if the proposal passes through review)

Genuine curiosity - what would be your motivation to use Java over C# here aside from familiarity (which is perfectly understandable)? The latter takes heavy focus on making sure to provide features like structs and pointers with little to no friction, you can even AOT compile it and statically link SDL2 into a single executable.

But either way, if you want to try it out, then all it needs is

- SDK from https://dot.net/download (or package manager of your choice if you are on Linux e.g. `sudo apt-get install dotnet-sdk-8.0`, !do not! use Homebrew if you are on macOS however, use .pkg installer)

- C# extension for VS Code (DevKit is not needed)

- SDL2 bindings: https://github.com/dotnet/Silk.NET

A couple other options than what has been suggested so far: - TerraFX.Interop.Windows. Raw, blittable, 1:1 bindings for all Win32, D2D/D3D11/D3D12 APIs (there's also a version with Vulkan bindings). As close to doing #include as you can get in C#. This is my personal favorite, I use it in my own ComputeSharp library, and transitively we use it in the Microsoft Store too 🙂 - Silk.NET another version of high-performance bindings, more opinionated than TerraFX and with some additional helpers to make it a bit easier to use.

Here is an example of using "releases" in GitHub: https://github.com/dotnet/Silk.NET/releases. Most repositories use releases and releases seem like they wpuld be appropriate for your repository too.

I've been looking at this. Is this similar to the UrhoSharp project you talk about? https://github.com/dotnet/Silk.NET

Have you looked at Silk.NET before?

Take a look at https://github.com/dotnet/Silk.NET . You should be able to use your existing rendering context with it. So you could use something like imgui (They have bindings for that) to render your UI. Or if you just start writing your rendering code, you could consider writing the whole rendering engine with it. I used it in the past for a game engine and performance is no problem for most of the usecases.