CNI for C

[Andrew Haley <aph at redhat dot com>]

Geert Bevin writes:
 > 
 > is there anything underway to offer something similar to CNI but then
 > for C and not for C++?

We haven't been working on this.

How would you do it?  What is the C equivalent of the this pointer, or
a virtual function?  I suppose we could write a bunch of macros to do
the job, but would anyone use them?

 > The Gnome project has been working very hard on Mono since "it
 > provides much better C integration than java". If GCJ would provide
 > an easy way to create native C bindings, then there's a much better
 > chance for it being adopted more widely in the Gnome community and
 > Java becoming a worthy alternate development language for it.

That's a very interesting idea.  However, the resistance to using CNI
has been that 

*  We can't use VM-specific features that may be useful, such as CNI.
   <http://ometer.com/desktop-language.html>

So even if we did create C-CNI, wouldn't this still be the case?
People would still not want to use it, because it's VM specific.

Andrew.