Java Native Access (JNA) is a community-developed library that provides Java programs easy access to native shared libraries without using the Java Native Interface (JNI). JNA's design aims to provide native access in a natural way with a minimum of effort. Unlike JNI, no boilerplate or generated glue code is required.
It defines a way for the bytecode that Android compiles from managed code (written in the Java or Kotlin programming languages) to interact with native code (written in C/C++). JNI is vendor-neutral, has support for loading code from dynamic shared libraries, and while cumbersome at times is reasonably efficient.
In software design, the Java Native Interface (JNI) is a foreign function interface programming framework that enables Java code running in a Java virtual machine (JVM) to call and be called by native applications (programs specific to a hardware and operating system platform) and libraries written in other languages ...
These are the problems I've encountered. Maybe there's more. But in general performance is not that different between jna and jni, so wherever you can use JNA, use it.
EDIT
This answer seems to be quite popular. So here are some additions:
So, I still believe that wherever possible, it is better to use JNA or BridJ, and revert to jni if performance is critical, because if you need to call native functions frequently, performance hit is noticeable.
It's difficult to answer such a generic question. I suppose the most obvious difference is that with JNI, the type conversion is implemented on the native side of the Java/native border, while with JNA, the type conversion is implemented in Java. If you already feel quite comfortable with programming in C and have to implement some native code yourself, I would assume that JNI won't seem too complex. If you are a Java programmer and only need to invoke a third party native library, using JNA is probably the easiest path to avoid the perhaps not so obvious problems with JNI.
Although I've never benchmarked any differences, I would because of the design, at least suppose that type conversion with JNA in some situations will perform worse than with JNI. For example when passing arrays, JNA will convert these from Java to native at the beginning of each function call and back at the end of the function call. With JNI, you can control yourself when a native "view" of the array is generated, potentially only creating a view of a part of the array, keep the view across several function calls and at the end release the view and decide if you want to keep the changes (potentially requiring to copy the data back) or discard the changes (no copy required). I know you can use a native array across function calls with JNA using the Memory class, but this will also require memory copying, which may be unnecessary with JNI. The difference may not be relevant, but if your original goal is to increase application performance by implementing parts of it in native code, using a worse performing bridge technology seems not to be the most obvious choice.
That is only what I can come up with off the top of my head, though I am not a heavy user of either. It also seems like you might avoid JNA if you wanted a better interface than the one they provide but you could code around that in java.
By the way, in one of our projects, we kept a very small JNI foot print. We used protocol buffers for representing our domain objects and thus had only one native function to bridge Java and C (then of course that C function would call a bunch of other functions).
It's not a direct answer and I have no experience with JNA but, when I look at the Projects Using JNA and see names like SVNKit, IntelliJ IDEA, NetBeans IDE, etc, I'm tend to believe it's a pretty decent library.
Actually, I definitely think I would have used JNA instead of JNI when I had to as it indeed looks simpler than JNI (which has a boring development process). Too bad, JNA wasn't released at this time.
I actually did some simple benchmarks with JNI and JNA.
As others already pointed out, JNA is for convenience. You don't need to compile or write native code when using JNA. JNA's native library loader is also one of the best/easiest to use I've ever seen. Sadly, you can't use it for JNI it seems. (That's why I wrote an alternative for System.loadLibrary() that uses the path convention of JNA and supports seamless loading from the classpath (ie jars).)
The performance of JNA however, can be much worse than that of JNI. I made a very simple test that called a simple native integer increment function "return arg + 1;". Benchmarks done with jmh showed that JNI calls to that function are 15 times faster than JNA.
A more "complex" example where the native function sums up an integer array of 4 values still showed that JNI performance is 3 times faster than JNA. The reduced advantage was probably because of how you access arrays in JNI: my example created some stuff and released it again during each summing operation.
Code and test results can be found at github.
If you want JNI performance but are daunted by its complexity, you may consider using tools that generate JNI bindings automatically. For example, JANET (disclaimer: I wrote it) allows you to mix Java and C++ code in a single source file, and e.g. make calls from C++ to Java using standard Java syntax. For example, here's how you'd print a C string to the Java standard output:
native "C++" void printHello() {
const char* helloWorld = "Hello, World!";
`System.out.println(#$(helloWorld));`
}
JANET then translates the backtick-embedded Java into the appropriate JNI calls.
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With