[Announce] GCCSharp - libgccjit bindings for C#

[David Malcolm]

On Thu, 2015-04-23 at 12:29 -0700, Mukul Sabharwal wrote:
> I'd like to introduce GCCSharp [ http://github.com/mjsabby/GCCSharp ]
> - libgccjit bindings for C# that are are modeled after the C Bindings,
> but improve type-safety by strongly typing the different pointers used
> (i.e. gcc_jit_context* is different from gcc_jit_result*, etc.); this
> also improves productivity in a C# IDE.
> 
> My primary use case for libgccjit is actually not using it is as JIT
> but as an AOT for a toy-but-turing-complete language, hence the
> project name GCCSharp which does not include the term JIT.
> 
> The bindings have only been tested on Linux (which is where I need
> this for my language port), I suppose for completeness I will work on
> testing this on Windows, but that will likely require a source build
> of GCC that I haven't gotten to yet.
> 
> Feedback and patches are welcome.

Hi Mukul; thanks for working on this!

I've added a link to your project to the wiki page at:
https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/JIT

On the subject of feedback, libgccjit's C API is rather verbose, but in
an object-oriented language it's possible to greatly simplify the client
code by using methods and namespaces.

(Caveat: I have zero C# experience, and am relying on the syntax
similarity with Java, with which I have close-to-but-not-zero
experience)

So rather than e.g.
      GCCJITTypeRef voidType = GCC.JITContextGetType(ctxt,
                                                     GCC_JIT_TYPES.GCC_JIT_TYPE_VOID);

would it be possible to have something like:

      TypeRef voidType = ctxt.GetType(TYPES.VOID);

where "TypeRef" would be a namespaced-lookup of

   "GCCSharp.TypeRef"

and "TYPES" would be (after namespace lookup) be "GCCSharp.TYPES", with
the GetType being a method of the
GCCSharp.Context class?

I did something like this for the C++ bindings, and for the Python
bindings.  The Python bindings do it by using two layers: a low-level
layer that binds the C API into the Python world, and then a
higher-level layer that adds an object-oriented approach to the API.

I hope that this would still work well within IDEs, and I think it looks
more elegant.

Hope this is constructive (and please forgive me if I'm missing
something)

Dave