jna

MSVCRT.Instance.printf("Hello, World\n"); for (int i=0;i < args.length;i++) { MSVCRT.Instance.printf("Argument %d: %s\n", i, args[i]); } } } > "C++ is more popular for systems programming" Sure, and it's got many great libraries – but actually using those is horrible. You're absolutely right about Rust though. crates.io and cargo are amazing tools with a great ecosystem. The primary issue I've got with the .NET ecosystem is actually closely related to that. Because it's so easy to import native libraries, often there's no .NET version of a library and everyone uses the native one instead. But if I actually want to build the native one I've got to work with ancient C++ build systems and all the arcane trouble they bring with them. > Same applies to "packages that bundle native libraries". You seem to have misunderstood. The fun part of the maven ecosystem is that a dependency doesn't have to be a jar, it can also be an XML that resolves to one or multiple dependencies depending on the environment.

force the native library unload just a little bit prematurely. Users reported occasional access violation errors during shutdown.

code using JNA. It is safe to call the Windows API equivalent (CreateProcess). It would be safe to call the handle/descriptor-based API I proposed. It is not safe to call fork. This is an undeniable deficiency of the fork-exec approach which competing approaches don't have. Furthermore, whatever compensating advantages fork-exec may have, the handle/descriptor-based API I proposed has the same advantages without this disadvantage. > > Another issue is that it is very hard to implement robust error handling without race conditions in the fork-exec model. > I don't think it is. You just print an error to stderr (write() is safe to call), and you return a bad error code (fork has built-in IPC for error codes via wait() in the parent). But that isn't robust. How can the parent process reliably distinguish output sent by the child process prior to the exec from output sent by the child process post the exec? Likewise, how can the parent process reliably distinguish an error return value from the child process prior to the exec from an error return value from the exec'd program? It can't. For truly robust error handling, you'd actually need to do something like this: (1) have a pipe between parent and child process with FD_CLOEXEC set on the child side; (2) the child sends the parent a message "I'm about to exec" before calling exec; (3) the child sends the parent a message saying "exec failed with errno=.." if the exec call fails; (4) if the exec call succeeds, the child process will close its end of the pipe without sending any message post "I'm about to exec". This is my point, actually robustly handling errors in the fork-exec model is quite complex. In a handle/descriptor based API it would be much simpler. (And the above approach using a pipe isn't perfectly robust – what if the child process crashes for some reason between sending the "I'm about to exec" message and actually calling exec()? It is very difficult for the parent process to reliably distinguish that scenario from some failure in the program being exec()'d.)