Could this approach be used to enable building shared/static libs for Dart, the same way that .NET does? about dart-embedding-example HOT 4 CLOSED

Hi @GavinRay97 (sorry for the late reply...)

I'm not sure what 100% sure what you're asking.

If you're just wondering if you could auto-generate C-callable functions that would initialize Dart for you and call into Dart code, I believe that's entirely possible, but probably outside of the scope of this example. This tells you how to initialize the Dart VM for embedding, and you could use that knowledge to create the generated code.

If you're more wondering about calling into compiled Dart, this example doesn't go into it, but you can initialize the Dart VM to compile .dart code, or load a pre-compiled library for JITting, or load an AOT compiled library. All three initialize about the same way with a few minor differences, but so far as I know you would still have to go through Dart functions to serialize / deserialize variables, so you can't just pull in a function pointer.

So, I think what you're asking is entirely possible, but probably won't be part of this repo.

Let me know if I totally misunderstood your question!

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Hey, no worries

If you're just wondering if you could auto-generate C-callable functions that would initialize Dart for you and call into Dart code, I believe that's entirely possible, but probably outside of the scope of this example. This tells you how to initialize the Dart VM for embedding, and you could use that knowledge to create the generated code.

I think this answers my question. Thank you!

Dart lets you compile Dart code to a binary. But you can't compile Dart code to a .dll/.so/.dylib etc.

Was curious if using this approach, you could produce a shared library, which exported your Dart methods as C-callable functions.

I think the only missing piece here for that is the codegen that you mentioned (which yes, is entirely out of scope for this).

from dart-embedding-example.

Yes, that's accurate. You could codegen all the necessary stuff to create your own dynamically linked library.

In reality, I'd love the dart team to support the embedded dart vm in a .dll / .so / .dylib, but I'm not sure that's coming any time soon.

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In reality, I'd love the dart team to support the embedded dart vm in a .dll / .so / .dylib, but I'm not sure that's coming any time soon.

So would I. There's no reason it couldn't be done + by my estimate, one person could do the feature realistically over some sprints. (At least a minimal working implementation and codegen)

I brought this up in a GH issue where they outright ignored the question, and then I told them I felt hurt by being outright ignored (not even told "no we're not doing it") and then they told me it's an out-of-scope question for the issue.

🤷

Priorities I guess

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