Wrapping up a C++ API in Java or .NET

Question

Has anyone successfully "wrapped up" a C++ API in Java or .NET? I have an application that provides a C++ API for writing plug-ins. What I'd like to do is access that API from .NET or Java.

Would I need to use COM, or are there simpler/better alternatives?

Answer 1

If you have a very straight forward method signatures (i.e. methods that takes and returns primitive types such as int, char[], void* ... etc), it is reasonably easy to do so in .NET and still possible but a bit harder in Java with JNI.

However, if your class methods uses modern C++ programming techniques such as boost shared pointers and STL containers then it is a very different story. You will need to be really careful with memory management in this case.

EDIT: It is gonna be even more interesting if the method has C++ template arguments because C++ template system is very different from C# or Java generics in that it is only a compile time mechanism. Basically this means the signature of the method or class is different every time you pass a different data type to the template argument. This made the method impossible to wrap in C# or Java.