Making Libraries Consumable for Non-C++ Developers
summary
Concrete checklist of what breaks and what to ship: enumerate interop routes used (C API, COM, FFI, SWIG, JNI, P/Invoke, C++/CLI, cgo, Objective‑C runtime) and show one minimal working example for each; list actual failures found—calling convention mismatch, size_t vs long differences, exception crossing ABI, and ambiguous char encoding (use UTF‑8); explain memory models with costs and fixes (manual vs refcount vs moving GC, GC handles and pinning), cost of chatty callbacks, and insist on explicit docs for ownership, packing, and allocator.
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chapters (21)
- 0:00Intro
- 1:30Who am I
- 3:35What is interop
- 8:10Common approaches
- 15:05Assumptions
- 17:25GetSize
- 19:30Calling Conventions
- 26:48ObjectiveC
- 28:56Tooling
- 29:44Memory Model
- 30:22Reference Counting Garbage Collection
- 31:43Memory Allocation
- 32:32Reference Counting
- 34:09NonReference Counting
- 38:37Handles
- 40:43Memory
- 44:55Threat Affinity
- 47:00Encoding
- 48:18Interop
- 49:32Questions
- 54:45A Bad Declaration
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