jextract VS Silk.NET

I don't think so, given that there are more popular Java libraries than popular libraries with a C ABI. There is a small number of very popular C libraries that result in the majority of native call uses. But in any event, calling native libraries in Java is now no longer a pain thanks to FFM (and jextract [1]) so we'll see.

Note that interaction with native libraries often requires more careful management of native memory that -- even though it's much easier now with FFM -- is still significantly trickier (and more dangerous in terms of introducing undefined behaviour) than interacting with Java code regardless of how that interaction is declared. In Java, as in Python, interaction with native code -- in the vast majority of cases -- is best encapsulated inside a Java library and not often directly exposed to application programmers.

[1]: https://github.com/openjdk/jextract

ok, maybe I mixed it up with jextract https://github.com/openjdk/jextract

This is one level below P/Invoke. It just offers a linking runtime API.

There's also has a tool that can generate all the bindings from a C header file automatically: https://github.com/openjdk/jextract

Then it doesn't really matter whether annotations are used or not, or some more low-level linker API (like FFM went with). As a user you just call into the generated bindings.

That's the philosophy: the JDK provides the low-level capabilities, and jextract provides the 'civilization', i.e. a usability focused layer on top. One of the advantages is that the JDK doesn't compete with other existing solutions, and those existing solution can benefit from the new linking runtime APIs as well.

Depending on how work-aroundy you're feeling, using Kotlin/JVM with Panama and jextract might be the way to go. The generated bindings are a bit ugly, you'd need to use the very latest JVM and enable the preview features, and it won't help if you need to target iOS. But the jextract tool can fully understand C headers including macros because it's using the LLVM clang API to do so.

You can use jextract and a JDK 19 pre-release build to generate bindings and then do a JMH benchmark.

None of that needs to be done in the JDK, though, and the "big" project that can make a big difference here is jextract. The rest can easily be done by libraries.

Panama incubator module is available on jdk 17 and you can also use jextract (https://github.com/openjdk/jextract) to generate all java code without writing any JNI glue code.

Genuine curiosity - what would be your motivation to use Java over C# here aside from familiarity (which is perfectly understandable)? The latter takes heavy focus on making sure to provide features like structs and pointers with little to no friction, you can even AOT compile it and statically link SDL2 into a single executable.

But either way, if you want to try it out, then all it needs is

- SDK from https://dot.net/download (or package manager of your choice if you are on Linux e.g. `sudo apt-get install dotnet-sdk-8.0`, !do not! use Homebrew if you are on macOS however, use .pkg installer)

- C# extension for VS Code (DevKit is not needed)

- SDL2 bindings: https://github.com/dotnet/Silk.NET

A couple other options than what has been suggested so far: - TerraFX.Interop.Windows. Raw, blittable, 1:1 bindings for all Win32, D2D/D3D11/D3D12 APIs (there's also a version with Vulkan bindings). As close to doing #include as you can get in C#. This is my personal favorite, I use it in my own ComputeSharp library, and transitively we use it in the Microsoft Store too 🙂 - Silk.NET another version of high-performance bindings, more opinionated than TerraFX and with some additional helpers to make it a bit easier to use.

Here is an example of using "releases" in GitHub: https://github.com/dotnet/Silk.NET/releases. Most repositories use releases and releases seem like they wpuld be appropriate for your repository too.

I've been looking at this. Is this similar to the UrhoSharp project you talk about? https://github.com/dotnet/Silk.NET

Have you looked at Silk.NET before?

Take a look at https://github.com/dotnet/Silk.NET . You should be able to use your existing rendering context with it. So you could use something like imgui (They have bindings for that) to render your UI. Or if you just start writing your rendering code, you could consider writing the whole rendering engine with it. I used it in the past for a game engine and performance is no problem for most of the usecases.