Today we’ll go through everything that happens when you make a P/Invoke call. We’ll see how native libraries are loaded and how marshaling works. We’ll touch on calling conventions and character sets. In the end, we’ll have a better understanding of what goes on when we call into native code.
Posts Tagged pointer
There are many posts that’ll tell you the “hello world” of calling native code like C++ from a C# Unity project. These tend to be simple examples though, so it’s hard to go from that to wrapping a real life useful native library. Today we’ll wrap SQLite, a popular C library that implements a database, and talk about the challenges in doing so and how to end up with a pleasant C# API for the rest of the game to use. Read on to learn how!
The C++ Scripting series continues today by going over some internal improvements that don’t add any features, but make the existing system more robust. We’ve lucked out in a couple of areas and today we’ll take the opportunity to fix them and learn about some inner workings of C++ and C# along the way.
C# has some powerful features like fixed-size buffers, pointers, and unmanaged local variable arrays courtesy of stackalloc. These are deemed “unsafe” since they all deal with unmanaged memory. We should know what we’re ultimately instructing the CPU to execute when we use these features, so today we’ll take a look at the C++ output from IL2CPP and the assembly output from the C++ compiler to find out just that.
It’s been quite a while in the series since we’ve added any fundamental C# language features. Today we’ll address one of the limitations of the C#/C++ communication: the lack of support for out and ref parameters. This is important as they’re commonly used by both the Unity API and .NET and we’d like C++ to be able to call functions with these kinds of parameters. So let’s delve into what it means for C++ to use out and ref parameters and see how to implement support for that across the language boundary.
The series is nearing an end! In today’s article we’ll cover so-called “unsafe” code that gives you unprecedented access to system memory. You can use this to optimize your app or integrate with native (e.g. C, C++) code and APIs. Read on to learn more about this powerful C# tool!
We know that you can automatically serialize anything to a ByteArray and that it’s faster and smaller than XML or JSON, but why is it so much smaller? Today’s article investigates a bit and reveals the secret that makes it such an efficient format and how that can save you a lot of manual work when it comes time to deserialize the ByteArray.
