CNI and interface methods

Fri Apr 3 18:54:00 GMT 2009

> Actually we did implement a rather limited form of interface calls in
> CNI. Interfaces types are described in CNI headers with __attribute__
> ((java_interface)), and the C++ compiler knows how to call a method
> on a type declared as such.
>> What is missing in the C++ compiler (and the CNI headers) is
> knowledge of interface inheritance, so you have to manually cast
> interface references if the method you want to call was declared in a
> super-interface.
>> This limitation is described here:
>> http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcj/Interfaces.html

Thanks for this. I'm fine with that limitation, but there seems to be a
second thing missing too (missing in the same sense, i.e. that it
requires casts that ideally wouldn't be there). The question was: from
the C++ side, given a pointer p to some object implementing interface
J, is it safe to pass that pointer to a Java method who CNI prototype
looks like, for example,
void foo(J *arg);
or not? Clearly from C++ we can't do
foo(p);
because it won't type-check; but we can do the following.
foo((J*) p);
It now appears the answer is "yes, this is okay" (whereas I'd been
worried that maybe some multiple-inheritance-style pointer adjustment
was not being done and was causing the segfaults I was seeing). 
The CNI docs should probably say that these casts are fine and
indeed required. I'll gladly submit a small patch to the docs if you
agree (and let me know where's best for me to send it).
Stephen