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What's the current status of Mono's Platform Invoke implementation on Linux and on Solaris?
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P/Invoke is a technology that allows you to access structs, callbacks, and functions in unmanaged libraries from your managed code. Most of the P/Invoke API is contained in two namespaces: System and System. Runtime. InteropServices .
* The term PInvoke is derived from the phrase "Platform Invoke". PInvoke signatures are native method signatures, also known as Declare statements in VB.
Interoperability enables you to preserve and take advantage of existing investments in unmanaged code. Code that runs under the control of the common language runtime (CLR) is called managed code, and code that runs outside the CLR is called unmanaged code.
Working, usable and stable. It's well tested since quite a lot of mono's own low-level functionality has to be marshaled through it to the underlying operating system.
There are some P/Invoke extensions when compared to Microsoft .Net implementation (after all they deal with a single OS family and three architectures at most). Most notable of those would be that library mappings transform the library name to OS-specific variants (e.g. mylib.dll searches for mylib.so on Linux, mylib.dylib on OS X and so on) and take into account various other system specific conventions. There is also a DLLMap configuration extension which can be used if the default name translations are not enough. Usually it's convenient to have the same API of the binary lib exposed on different OSes, so that migrating between platforms only requires changes in the C code, not the .Net part.
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