Re: object serialisation

From:

Tom Anderson <twic@urchin.earth.li>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.programmer

Date:

Thu, 25 Nov 2010 23:54:30 +0000

Message-ID:

<alpine.DEB.1.10.1011252353350.3254@urchin.earth.li>

On Thu, 25 Nov 2010, Mike Schilling wrote:

If you're rolling your own, how about this? Create a utility that
generates a C header file for a specified class, defining it as a C
struct, and when your JVM calls into C, pass a pointer to that struct
instead of an opaque pointer. Your C can now access everything in the
class directly instead of having to use JNI. (Having the header define
function pointers used to call the class's methods would be a further
step.) You lose Java's safety guarantees [1], which are the main reason
that JNI is so clumsy, but to offset that, you have huge gains in
efficiency and ease.

1. That is, you gain C's full freedom to scribble all over random bits
of memory.

You already have that freedom when writing C against JNI. JNI merely makes
it more challenging to find the random bits of memory where you can really
do some damage!

tom

--
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by
stupidity -- Hanlon's Razor