Re: CNI and interface methods

[Stephen Kell <srk31@srcf.ucam.org>]

> 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