Native AOT CLI Experience Improvements in .NET 8

[agocke]

The Native AOT CLI (SDK) experience has a lot of rough edges and room for improvement.

• Improve experience when using PublishAot with unsupported RID #73678
• NativeAOT: dwarfdump --verify produces thousands of warnings and errors #72552
• Improve static library publishing #70277

I couldn't figure out the best area label to add to this issue. If you have write-permissions please help me learn by adding exactly one area label.

Tagging subscribers to this area: @agocke, @MichalStrehovsky, @jkotas
See info in area-owners.md if you want to be subscribed.

Issue Details

---

The Native AOT CLI (SDK) experience has a lot of rough edges and room for improvement.

• Improve experience when using PublishAot with unsupported RID #73678
• NativeAOT: dwarfdump --verify produces thousands of warnings and errors #72552
• Improve static library publishing #70277

Author:	agocke
Assignees:	-
Labels:	area-NativeAOT-coreclr
Milestone:	-

[xylobol]

Sorry to bump this with a few people on it, but I'm interested in helping with this. I have a few projects I want to work on that depend on building native libraries from C# code, but the experience has been frustrating. I'm not very experienced with "compiler stuff", nor have I landed changes in .NET, but I'd love to learn way more about both, and this seems like a great opportunity to do so. If you've got time, please send some pointers for where work can be done on these.

[agocke]

@xylobol The issues linked in there might be a good place to get started, but I'd love to make your experience better.

Maybe you could try writing down what you wanted to and what you expected the experience to be, then the problems with it? Writing native libraries is a pretty new thing for the dotnet toolchain so I expect there are some rough edges, but don't have a good sense of what people will run into.

[xylobol]

I'm trying to get a "native" shared library that I can dynamically load from a C/C++ program running on Linux. The generation itself seems to be fine on the .NET side - I can inspect the compiled library and see my methods. I haven't been able to consume the library though - per #70277, there's a ton of extra things to link when building. A complete example using CMake would be very helpful.

[xylobol]

I got it working and prepared an example solution over at https://github.com/Xylobol/DotNet-NativeAOT-Library-Example. I'm likely going to add extra information on writing headers and calling from C/C++ later, maybe in addition to how to deal with static libraries.

EDIT 12/24/22, a few minutes after posting: A source generator for header files would be killer

[xylobol]

A few more questions:

• How do I handle a callback passed in by native code? e.g. I have an exported C# method void DoSomething(SomeType callback) and native code wants to give it a callback
• Any reason I can't use byte[]?

Merry Christmas or whatever you all may celebrate, and happy New Year!